I left school having taken my A levels just before I was eighteen. I spent my eighteenth birthday babysitting for a friend of my mother’s who desperately needed my help and left me to care for her one year old and five year old. I couldn’t have been less interested and it was only the […]Read Post ›
I don’t usually use bad language and never write it but sometimes for artistic integrity you have to indicate what was said. A true story: A couple of weeks ago I decided to wait for a bus home as I had already walked about ten kilometres that day, and thought I could do with a […]Read Post ›
For Annie – Lola Valerie Stein, and anyone who has done the real thing! https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/barbara-korzeniowska2 Dear Friends and Supporters, This is going to be a surprise to many of you, and possibly a big shock to my system, because I have decided to challenge myself to climb Mount Kilimanjaro – virtually of course – in […]Read Post ›
Today I am on safari. In my kitchen. I am wearing khaki and trying to blend in with my environment. I stand very still and look out of my kitchen window which looks out onto my garden. it is tiny – 22 feet by 12, north facing and very dark – but what a riot of colour. Cyclamen, […]Read Post ›
About ten years ago – actually almost exactly ten years ago, my husband and I went to Damascus for the weekend. A strange thing to do, I suppose, as it is quite far away – normally we try to go to Paris for our anniversary weekend, but that year we wanted to do something different. […]Read Post ›
This is a story which my son discovered about some of his paternal ancestors. I have translated it from a newspaper article which I attach below. And a link to a a map. At the beginning of the nineteenth century in the centre of the present park stood a hunting lodge belonging to the Doschot […]Read Post ›
At home, trying to keep busy and not think about the reasons for being at home and trying to keep busy. A few days ago this piece of embroidery fell out of its ancient plastic bag in the cupboard where I had been hoarding it since we moved in in 1986, and demanded to be […]Read Post ›
For MH We seem to be living in a long Good Friday at the moment. When I was a child Good Friday was a very special day. Everything was closed except for the church, which was open for people to come and venerate the cross. No other ceremony or celebration was allowed. No Mass, no […]Read Post ›
I love going to the theatre. There is nothing that beats the anticipation, the atmosphere, the pleasure of being in an enclosed space with hundreds of other people all focusing with rapt attention on the stage in front of you – waiting for the action to unfold and the ideas to develop. And, if I […]Read Post ›
For MO When I was very young my parents went through a very acrimonious divorce, and one outcome was that I was not allowed to go abroad with my mother, or even out of London without my father’s sayso. My mother had a full time job and so found it difficult to look after me […]Read Post ›
Life Through Basia's Eyes 