I always feel nervous when a new book comes out. I avoid the book review sections of newspapers. I don’t go anywhere near my books on Amazon. My publishers send photocopies of clippings from papers magazines but I leave the envelopes they come in unopened. I hate reading reviews of my stuff. Good, bad or [...]

Some of you might remember Filippo a.k.a. The Waspmaster from Vroom with a View and Vroom by the Sea. Well, a couple of weeks ago he became a father to a mini-waspmaster called Leandro. ‘Little’ Leo weighed in at a whopping 4.2 kilos so ‘mini’ is probably not the right word. Anyway, I only found [...]

As part of my research for Blimey! I’ve been trying to find out more about one of my grandfathers who flew with the RAF in the Second World War. Sadly he didn’t make it back. He was shot down over Burma. Tracing him through his records has been a weird, sometimes emotional experience. None more [...]

An unexpected and strange side-effect of having a few books published is that all of a sudden you’re regarded as a bit of an expert. A couple of hundred pages, bound and glued, it seems, is the key to instant credibility. Readers’ Digest, for example, have asked me to be their Italian ‘expert’ for an [...]

Just got back from a couple of days visiting the in-laws in Lincoln. It was grey and misty – like it always seems to be in Lincoln – so I popped up to the castle to see one of the four original copies left of the Magna Carta. Of course, it wasn’t there. It was [...]

Vroom by the Sea is officially released in the UK today. So I popped over to Amazon.co.uk to check out how it was doing. I was delighted to see that it was number one. OK. It was number one in the ‘travel books about Italy’ list. But still, not bad for a book that Amazon [...]

I took this shot at my local BP petrol station. It’s an advertisement in the shape of a giant beer can, right next to the bowser, alerting motorists that they can stock up on some ice cold tinnies when they go inside to pay. It seems wrong somehow. But I think that’s because I’ve been [...]