Travel
Diwali Eve
Here at Dignity Lifestyle, everyone is busy preparing for the festival of lights. The old folk seem in a more festive mood than usual and everyone is wishing everyone else a Happy Diwali. The air today was ominously silent, but the firework fest has started this...
Halloween in the Lane
Bewitched, the sitcom about the cute blonde witch who cast spells by wiggling her pert little nose, and her besotted husband Darren, was my first encounter with Halloween and trick or treating. My mum was a huge fan. When Charlie Brown and friends were given only...
Suite and sour
Demonstrators on the main Pune-Mumbai highway demanded quotas for Maratha people in education and government jobs yesterday, echoing the longstanding quotas for people of lower, scheduled castes. This is probably not the place to talk about that in detail except that...
Help
We are in the process of recruiting a maid, known there as a "helper" for our house in Hong Kong. With our impending empty nest it's debatable whether we really need anyone to clean or cook for us really, but that does seem to be the prevailing culture all...
Nougat
Montélimar. In my mind since I first visited this part of France when I was 14, it would be a hill-top hamlet, the ultimate destination of scores of tourist buses winding up the narrow vertiginous hairpin bends. The tiny village of colourful ancient stone...
Visit to Kaohsiung
To round off our reconnaissance trip to Hong Kong last week, we popped over to Taiwan to see my old tongxue 同學, Desmond, who teaches English at a university in Kaohsiung. It was an opportunity to visit a place we’d wouldn’t normally have gone to and a fascinating...
Be a lady …
…and wear a dress
Proud householder
I’ve been doing a bit of birdwatching.