Author Archives: Elaine Elkington

This old fashioned, Hulot-esque town overlooks the sea on the north coast of France. I was introduced to it by my sister and her husband. Almost fifty years ago Mickey and his friend managed to cross the Channel in not much more than a leaky dinghy. They lost their way and finally landed somewhere in […]

The ‘dog days’ of August – people on holiday, searching for the sun, which they seem to have left behind in London. It was so very hot. I used to work in Mayfair in the 1970s for Heinemann – publishers in Curzon Street, near Shepherd’s Market. Mayfair was always wealthy and quiet, with an ambient […]

Last year I was given a giant terracotta pot, full of succulents, for Christmas. They looked exquisite and in the early Spring I decided to put them out on the garden table for a day or two. The sun was warm and I thought they would benefit from fresh air. On the second morning, I […]

John was speaking at a conference here and I was invited along by ‘Atlas For The Future’. This is a company run by two very talented women – Lisa Goldapple and Cathy Runciman. They are both fabulous. This was my first visit to Barcelona and it would be only for two days. Early evening sun […]

Corsica! I’d never been but the word conjures up a wild, mountainous landscape where shepherds and brigands roast whole goats on spits and live out their lives far away from society in towns and cities. Savage cliffs plunge into rough seas. And the interior is somewhat like the lost world, feral and untamed … some […]

A big conference here at the beginning of February beckoned, asking John as one of the main speakers. My birthday was looming, I had hardly been to Copenhagen, so I got to come along. I say ‘hardly’ because we hitch hiked back from Stockholm in 1969 and were dropped off at a bus stop with […]

Sicily was on our list of places to go for a long time.  The thought of being a navigator in a rental car as well as working out all the places to visit (in a week), led me to thinking that going in a group and being ‘looked after’ was a tempting alternative.  A friend […]

It’s not often that I’m so utterly bowled over by a chance buy that I want to tell everybody about it and insist they read it.   And it’s even more exciting when I’ve never heard of the author. ‘Only To Sleep’, by Lawrence Osborne, has written on the front cover of the book ‘A […]

Vera, our neighbour’s cat, peers at me through the fig tree.  She’s lying on the shed roof, enjoying the warmth of the sun.

We usually stay at home in August, taking holiday at a less busy time.  So things are reasonably quiet in our neck of the woods at the moment. I suggested to John we have a ‘reading week’.  Instead of fitting reading for pleasure into the short time before falling asleep at night, we would instead […]