A DUTCH friend gave us some Roomboter Waffeltjies, or some such name, the other day. They're a sort of papal-strength wafer soaked, steeped, clarted in rum butter. I had one with my afternoon tea (a Lapsang Souchong-Russian Caravan mix) and felt t
Read more: Christopher Campbell-Howes looks over his shoulder . . .
THERE WAS time enough for an apéritif outside before the first distant thumps and rumbles of thunder came too close for comfort. Easy-peasy, relax, stay cool, as Sir Francis Drake might have said, eyeing up the lie of his bowls as he glance
Read more: Christopher Campbell-Howes is simultaneously thunderstruck and mussel-bound
"YOU'LL BE a man, my son" wrote Kipling at the end of "If", a poem which warms the heart of some as much as it really gets up the nose of others.
After all the hype, puffery and scramble for sponsorship surrounding the F
Read more: Christopher Campbell-Howes leafs through the dictionary of quotations . . .
3am. What they call the wee sma' hours in Inverness and les petites heures here in the south of France. It's been one of those nights. The cats, Pinot and Merlot, won't settle. It's not just their nature, it's not that they're always on the wrong
Read more: Christopher Campbell-Howes is disturbed by things that go bump in the night . . .
Read more: Christopher Campbell-Howes blows with the prevailing wind . . .
MAJOR SUCKER for pomp and circumstance here, I'm afraid. July 14th – la fête nationale, the anniversary of the 1789 revolutionary mob breaking into the Bastille, the Paris prison/fortress symbolic of royalist rule – July 14th fou
THERE'S AN unexpected duel going on inside our letter-box. You wouldn't have thought it, just looking at it from the outside, but inside its placid green exterior there's goodness knows what Gallic mayhem and brouhaha going on . . .
The spi
Read more: Christopher Campbell-Howes reads the political auguries . . .