On EU referendum day I had my first funeral at Boston Crematorium, the English heartland of Brexit, with a higher percentage of people who want Britain out of the EU than anywhere else in the country.  It was a damp, grey morning as I drove from Newark across miles of largely empty farmland.  As I pulled into the car park of a large Asda, the Boston Stump loomed out of the mist.  Driving on through the town I saw rows of neat terraced houses interspersed with Eastern European food stores. The crem. is a grim fifties edifice in some well-kept parkland.  I was shown into the Vestry and later given a quick tour of the chapel and shown the buttons for changing the music and closing the curtains.  I drove back to Newark at lunchtime, and in the afternoon picked up my motorbike from the garage and had a nice chat with the garage owner about bikes and touring and double-checking the bill he even found a mistake and knocked a few quid off.  Then I went to the P...

Sat on plane from Brindisi to Stansted, bored and tired.  Somewhere below through the clouds is a flat bit of France or Germany.  I'm only over for three odd weeks during which I have a funeral, a memorial and a wedding.  Also in two weeks I'm meeting Sue at Stansted so we can go together to a kind of memorial meet up in Brighton for our old friend Keith. Oh and there's the UK referendum on EU membership.  Reading the Guardian the chattering classes are suddenly in a panic as the polls swing towards Brexit from a comfortable remain lead a few weeks ago.  I find all this scary and disorientating.  I had complacently assumed that as the deadline loomed people's fear of change would widen the gap in favour of remain and this may still prove to be the case.  But I'm realising increasingly that there are a lot of angry and dispossessed people out there who pin their anger on immigration and see Brexit as some kind of solution. My reaction to all ...

I took this photo last week lying on our bed in the afternoon in a lovely little hotel in the centre of Peschici, a small port and resort on the tip of the Gargano peninsula in the north of Puglia. Since I got back to Puglia in early May we've been working hard getting our house and land ready for the summer, so we took a break for a few days to relax and recharge our batteries. It's only our second time in the Gargano, the first time being a day trip with Old Paolo and Erminia to St Giovani Rotondo, the centre of the Padre Pio industry not long after we bought the house in 2004. Although further north than our home it actually feels more remote, because it's far from the main autoroutes and regional airports. At the centre of the peninsula is the Foresta Umbra, an ancient woodland of oak, beech and pine to which wolves were reintroduced a few years ago.  We took a stroll in it for a couple of hours, enjoying the shade and the peace and feeling strangely reminde...