The most miserable year of my life was the year I spent as a boarder at Solihull School, 1966. I wrote about it in too much detail elsewhere: how dreadfully I missed my…

In December of 2017 I turned 65. This means, officially, that I am getting old. I am not. I may have reached the age of the “old age pensioner” of my youth,…

This post is a warning to Paris’s abundant startup techies: you can’t always trust your employers! Disclosure: the techie here is my son Nick. Keep reading for a variety of tricks used…

So the first thing that you should know is that sometimes others assert that I have poor filters and am a little too honest. This is one context when that quality might…

I lived with and under that tarpaulin for maybe seven months. Obviously, I did not want to move into the RV in the first place. I’m an RV fan, but for travel…

I was sitting at the bar in Oswald’s, one of Santa Cruz’s nicer restaurants, chatting and flirting. This was during the year’s gap between girlfriends, sometime during the summer. First a woman…

I did reach the top of Mount Tallac, the craggy mountain that dominates the Southwest shore of Lake Tahoe. But only just. The last few hundred vertical feet had been very hard,…

Nick came home for his 30th birthday. At least, I feel like it’s his home here in California, although his mother makes her home in Paris, and he spent half his childhood…

It’s Christmas Day, an incredibly beautiful day here in Santa Cruz after the wind and rain of the last few days. As we drove home, the air was clearer and brighter than…

The AirBnB listing for the apartment said that it was a fourth floor walk-up, but the comments on AirBnB warned us that it was more like five floors. It was five, and it…

Another year done, as Charlie delicately reminded me recently. I was trying to help him recognize a girl he knew whom I had met, and told him that her hair color was…

Happy Holidays, everyone!! It’s been a solitary year here. I don’t say lonely, because with the possible exception of holidays built around families, I’m having a fine time – so many little…

Santa Cruz Mayor Ryan Coonerty is a chocoholic, as am I. We both work at NextSpace Santa Cruz, Ryan for PredPol, an interesting start-up that uses technology to help police forces do…

On Monday morning, August 1, 2011, Nick (my oldest) arrived at work to be told that he was being laid off immediately and would not be paid the last month’s salary of…

You know that you’re getting old when the McCartney featured in the Queen’s New Year’s honors list is named Stella. Stella? Oh, that’s right, Sir Paul’s daughter, honored for services to British…

Aunty Vi died in England in April this year, and her son Ron had arranged a memorial service for her in August. She was mum’s last surviving sibling. That was it: a…

October 2012: stumbling off the red-eye at JFK, I took the New York State Thruway, Interstate 87, north to Saratoga Springs, spent a few hours on client matters in a Starbucks there,…

A short weekend road trip into the mountains, just one night away, became two satisfying if modest tales. The first was planned. Sort of. I’d been itching to see Ron and Dennis…

When I told Alex that I was going to post about what it’s like living with Nick now, he replied instantaneously, “there’s a Kern’s can in the shower!” That’s what it’s always…

This postcard started a long piece of internet detective work, that unfortunately failed. At least at first. While I was visiting her in February 2008 at her home in East Sussex, Aunt…

It’s the time of year when we look back on all that we’re grateful for, an easy job here. We’re especially grateful for teenagers and twenty-somethings! I was quietly watching the Beatles’…

They may be getting older, but Disneyland still works for my next generation. And for me! So much for small talk. Nick called me a few weeks after I first uploaded this…

On to Paris, for a couple of days. I was going to see Tom, only he didn’t know it yet. Tom had actually been the trigger that started me on this whole…

My summer vacation, taken early this year, focused on trains. I fitted in a few friends and family, of course, but this vacation was all about trains. Most of them were real,…