WELL, WHAT would you have done?
You'd have done what I did, wouldn't you? You'd have fetched the net and rescued the poor . . . but I'd best start at the beginning.
Water's such a precious commodity round here, especially in high sum
Read more: Christopher Campbell-Howes does his bit for local wildlife . . .
THERE'S A first time for everything, of course. Catching measles, eating oysters or spinach, riding a bike without stabilisers, baking an uncollapsed sponge, your first unassisted length of the pool, uttering a virgin merci or bonjour on your firs
Read more: Christopher Campbell-Howes thinks he will overcome, some day . . .
Sunday night is nostalgia night here. Useless to resist. Despite all these years of expat life (Josephine 18, me coming up for 12), all these years of practically going native here in the south of France, despite all those struggles with thorny br
Read more: Christopher Campbell-Howes gets out his deerstalker and magnifying glass . . .
I SHOULDN'T have mentioned it, of course. Just tempting providence. Any public hint that I was building a wall carried the seeds of its collapse. In my beginning is my end. I suppose that's true of any human project, really. But need it have happe
Read more: Christopher Campbell-Howes wishes he'd never mentioned it . . .
I WAS splitting cherry logs when an unfamiliar car drew up nearer the house. A smartly-dressed woman got out, picked her way across a shallow ditch and peered closely at a rotten tree stump.
Remembering that once during his madness George I
Read more: Christopher Campbell-Howes does't come back empty handed . . .
IT'S ALL very hilly in this part of France, and any cultivable land has been wrested from the hillside by building up terraces. The terraces are broad or narrow according to the slope, and usually they're planted with olive or cherry trees, and a
Read more: Christopher Campbell-Howes goes up the wall . . .
We were just watching what they called the 'enthronement' of some new Chevaliers on the steps of the mairie – you never know what village life is going to throw up next - when Lazare, a kindly old man from a neighbouring village, came up and
Read more: Christopher Campbell-Howes turns over some old chestnuts . . .