Dear Wonderful Friends, Wishing you a Merry Christmas Day filled with love and good things amongst family and friends and your beloved animals, of course!  Thank you so much for your love and comments throughout the year on this blog,  on Facebook and on Instagram –  it has meant SO much to me.  With all the fear and negativity in the world, one of the things we can do is love our family, friends and animals and be loved back.   So have a wonderful day today. This is little ‘Indy’ posing for you.  I rather think she wants it over ..
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Since living in France, all my dogs have been rescue dogs and are nearly always older dogs.  Not many people adopt older dogs and truly they are the best!  You are in need of love?  Adopt an older dog! Anyway this isn’t the story of ‘my latest dog’ but it’s of the one who got away.  I’ve been looking for a friend for my last rescue dog, Ours  (‘Bear’ in English).   Ours is pronounced – sort of – like ‘horse’ without the ‘h’).  Yes I know it would have been easier had I changed his name to Bear!  Ours ..
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It’s not that I particularly like sepia – in fact, give me good ol’ black and white anytime.  Or colour.  But I belong to a small group of very sympa photographers and friends who get together in Menton and the surrounding villages to  recreate the past in images of life as it was once lived.  At the moment, we are ‘in the 1920s’ when sepia was still in use. In film photography, it was a chemical process carried out on silver-based photographic prints and had the advantage of being more resistant to the degradation of time.  However, during the first ..
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  Dogs are welcome in most restaurants and bars in France and Monaco, except perhaps the grandest.  The American Bar in the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, for example, will serve your champagne (what else would you order in the Hotel de Paris?)  And he’ll quickly return with a bowl of water served on a tray, laid with a white cloth, and a plate of dog biscuits should Monsieur le Chien be a little peckish.       In fact, dogs are allowed in most places in France including  shops and markets.  However, in supermarkets there is always a ..
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  If you go to Naples – and please go to Naples – a city where life is lived on the streets and people are ready to smile and laugh at the smallest thing. The poor are rich. They have what really matters: family and community. And they are so open to anyone who obviously loves them and their beautiful city. And if you go, try and go during the Feast of San Gennaro which takes place in the cathedral of Naples. The cathedral houses a vial of the blood of Saint Januarius (San Gennaro), the city’s patron saint, which ..
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