Sometimes he sneaks up behind me when I’m in the kitchen and puts an arm in the small of my back. I take a breath or jump, kitchen knife in hand. Of course, it’s Andrew, however, somehow it hasn’t registered that […]

The first sport I did was serving orange quarters to Amazonian Australian girls who were on the teams. As these things tend to go, the same girls didn’t just make one team; they stormed onto all of them. As a s […]

Carl Honoré is approaching his 50th birthday with trepidation. He’s worried about what happens on the other side and this sets the background for Bolder.

This context is worth remembering as you read Bold […]

Unlike many people of my vintage, I’d never experienced dying up close. Last year the universe sent me on a crash course, reuniting me with my friend Bob whom I’d met at university in 1979. This isn’t just a s […]

There’ll be times when you’re walking down the street and you’ll see two twenty-somethings with legs all the way to Lithuania, and that paradoxically world-weary manner of girls who have the world ahead of them. […]

The next time I saw the Frenchman he was holed up in luxury at Blakes. He’d thoughtfully and firmly requested I join him for two days. The morning of his arrival from Paris I was standing at my lingerie drawer, […]

I’m rarely asked why I chose not to have children. I’ll admit the idea of missing out on mum politics and a school run did disturb me but it passed. People I know have never felt the necessity to discuss the topic […]

Time was when the only accessories to be seen with in your local cafe were a black coffee and a cigarette. There are parts of the world where this still happens, but unfortunately these now tend only to surface in […]

It was Suzanne, she of this site who told me to go Tinder. Basically I hadn’t been writing nor had I been fucking and was missing both. “You go on Tinder then you can write about it. Win-win.”

Having done […]