My celebrity rant of the week: I hugely respect John Mayer as a song writer (a kudos I reserve for maybe three or four other all-time musicians) so I can only shake my head at his impromptu press conference over the weekend to open up about his break-up with Jennifer Aniston. “There's no lying, there's no cheating, there's no nothing.” Well done

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Rural England is my escape pod, my bolthole, my favourite time-off destination. But I couldn't live there permanently.

I've been chatting over a pint with Mark for many years at my local in rural Buckinghamshire. He disappeared for a while and as no one brought it up, I just assumed he'd moved away.

The truth was more dismaying. Mark was in the

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As expats there are things that rile us about France and the French. We've been brought up in different environments where different social and practical rules apply and so we naturally think differently. It's not realistic to assume that a people whose backgound is so different from our own anglo-saxon model is going to align themselves to our

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Standing in line at an x-ray clinic today, waiting, waiting, waiting while the ill-mannered receptionist, whose detached and unsympathetic mannerisms I've become accustomed to over time, continued to ignore me. No, there was nobody else in line, in the lobby, in the parking lot. But there I was leaning against the wall.

An elderly couple came out

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