Author Archives: Elaine Elkington

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 […]

We came back late by the pond.  The restaurant (Côte) was just closing. A heron was standing by the water.

Five precious days away.  Given what we wanted was a beautiful place with comfort, rest and relaxation, I relied on a recommendation of somebody who had stayed at ‘Es Molí’ last year.  Never keen on the laborious task of filling in those internet forms, I remembered that many years ago, before you had to do […]