Feel free to contact me. No time wasters. As Thoreau of Walden Pond put it: ‘As if you could kill time without injuring eternity’. Tall order, but even so.
I have lived in Sevenoaks in Kent for just over seven years - west of the Medway which makes me a Kentish Man rather than (as I’d prefer) a Man of Kent, but that’s not much of a setback. I love the county: it’s green, varied, perfect cycling country. I do not own a car and hire one when necessary. Five minutes from here and I am on country lanes. Roads wind up through wooded vales to a ridge from where a glorious view opens out across the Weald. Orchards and hopfields are far less plentiful than they once were, but they still exist. Shepherd Neame of Faversham, the oldest brewery in the land, still produces good ale and I frequently ride past Larkins of Chiddingstone, one of the 11 smaller Kentish breweries still in operation. I don’t drink a lot of beer but I find the existence of these independents comforting, as, too, the fact that Kent has a nominal border with France halfway along the Channel tunnel.
I go to France often, whether for the day to lunch, shop and dine, in and outside Calais – a simple trip from here with a friend – or else to Paris, to visit friends and perhaps spend some time in the old Bibliothèque Nationale, and frequently to the Pyrenees to see my friends there and ride the mountains.
For the rest, I work, enjoy the company of a small circle of warm-hearted and intelligent friends with no side, read widely and listen to music and probably don’t go out enough. I do not, though, subscribe to the view that ‘writing is an excuse for not living’. That was an opinion voiced by someone who didn’t do either quite seriously enough.
Yours
Graeme Fife