claytoncast

So it isn't often these days I get the chance of a holiday on my own. My holiday preference would always be with my partner Richard and some of our best times together have been spent relaxing by various pools around the world. However recently a set of coincidences conspired to allow me to spend the last week at Chez Castillion in the Dordogne, a beautiful house run by my long-time dearest friend Janie Millman and her lovely husband Mike. They moved over to France about three years ago having bought the house they have done an absolutely brilliant job of doing it up and turning it into a gorgeous retreat. They run courses on photography, painting, and creative writing and you stay as a house guest while partaking in the course for six days. I've read a lot about it on their website and various other people's posts on Facebook and yet I suppose until you experience something yourself there's always a little scepticism that remains. I didn't believe it coul

Recently things have all been about family. Or more specifically Mum, and that continues to be the case.  On Tuesday I went up to Doncaster for the day just to spend a couple of hours taking Mum out of the home on a trip. It was a great success and we both enjoyed it, but it was a long day and means a sort of 12 1/2 hour round-trip just to spend a couple of hours with her in the afternoon. Something I'm going to have to get used to the and a price well worth paying for knowing that she is safe, comfortable, and being well looked after. She's doing sterling work and looking after all the 80-year-olds. It's not all been family though. Friends featured in the week past in two rather wonderful ways. Yesterday I had lunch in Bristol with three people I was at school with. We've not really seen each other for 27 or so years, certainly not in the flesh. One is now something very high up in the electoral commission, the other has worked in the city for years and i

 I'm pretty sure that it's the rather wonderful book “The Go-Between" by LP Hartley that begins with the wonderful line  “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there"  It's been on my mind as Richard and I just spent 4 days in Yorkshire clearing out my mom's house. And by clearing out, I really do mean clearing out. End of season sale. Everything must go! We found a home for several pieces of large 1920s furniture which were collected on Thursday morning and left the house after the removal of a couple of banisters, but the huge amount of ephemera of my mother's life that still remained in the house had to be gone through, checked, and then either left for the house clearance people, or put into a box for us to bring to London. I have to say that I was up for throwing out more than I thought I would be and there were several items of my own personal history that Richard insisted I boxed up and brought to London. Selecting thi

For many  of us life is an enigma. Listening to the lunchtime news on the radio today as I drove to the supermarket - snow in Scotland in April, recession, and the usual clutch of government based horror stories - one is tempted to ask the question………… why? What's it all for? That's far too big an issue for me to deal with here, but what does intrigue and quite often infuriate and irritate me are the Little puzzles that life  chooses to confront us with. These come in many forms. For some people, and here I'm including most of the rest of the world, it can be a ticket machine on the London Underground or at a train station. For others it's an ATM. I expect I'm not the only person who has stood behind someone at a cash machine only to begin to grow wide-eyed in amazement at the amount of time it's taken the person to make their transaction. For some people it would seem that the options thrown up by the hole in the wall are akin to an episode of Univers