How Gardening Inspires Healthier Living and Benefits Overall Well-being Below is a piece by Paul Denikin ([email protected]) from the USA, on the improvements both mental and physical that gardening affords us. Paul writes: As we navigate the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, finding a sanctuary that promotes tranquility and wellness becomes increasingly important. Gardening, a seemingly humble hobby, has proven to be a powerful catalyst for healthier living and overall well-being. This practice goes beyond the harvest of homegrown produce; it’s a therapeutic journey that...

Margot says you must see Kaffe Fassett at the Dovecot!  Kaffe Fassett?  It rings a bell, yes, at Alf and Niki’s wedding he and another gay man admired the jacket I was wearing.  It was faded black cotton, embroidered with pale yellow suns that I’d bought at a market in Dali, China for 20 dollars.  I was pleased at the compliment but when he introduced himself I’d never heard of Kaffe Fassett, quilter, embroiderer extraordinaire.  Since then I have, and wish I had talked and asked more.  So now in Edinburgh, off to the Dovecot.  On the walls are dozens of brilliant...

2023 Late April in Edinburgh 67 bus stop at North Bridge, then nearly an hour on the 67 to Pencuik. winding through  suburbs with the prim little houses (based on crofts?), warehouses and shopping centres of south Edinburgh, and sometimes glimpsing the Pentland Hills.  Thank heavens builders don’t put houses on hills unless they have to, they want it flat, leaving jagged country gloriously free.   A few fields and then – sorry Scotland – a typical mean Scotch village, Rosslyn.  The driver calls, and several of us get out. A fancy visitors centre, crowded, lies at the end of a lane.  £7.50...

Greece, Greece, we must go to Greece, says B.  He’s 91.  I get tickets. Why am we so smitten by Greece?  From the first time I saw Athens, coming in by bus and glimpsing the Parthenon floating on the Acropolis I have loved the place. Forget the slavery, men’s views on women, their bellicosity and infighting, that touchy Achilles, their religion which has nothing of transcendence or universal love, and think of the Greek love of beauty – the sight of a beautiful naked body! (why did this vanish with Christianity?) – their curiosity and friendliness, their openness to every idea. ...

Over the new bridge and the blue Gulf of Corinth onto the Peloponnese.  A peninsula. PATRAS Industrial buildings all the way to the port of Patras, happily not that far.  We are disgorged at the dock for Italian ferries.  No hotel booked, but eventually a taxi comes and I tell him the Astir Hotel because my ipad showed a swimming pool on its roof.  A large, dark, shiny impersonal hotel, used for conventions, weddings and the like.  Yes, a room, and when we get there it is a view (oh how views matter!) across the gulf to Byron’s Messolongi. A day to spare, and I walk – it’s some way – to...