Welcome to the latest issue of my newsletter. If you subscribe I’ll send you a free copy of my Microcosmos Fiction Magazine, containing five original stories. Thanks for reading.

Sloppy workmanship, you could call it. Or maybe half-hearted iconoclasm. The alteration men of the Reformation or Puritanism, whichever it was, only removed half the wall painting. The other half of this thirteenth-century depiction of the Wheel of Fortune was hidden behind a pulpit in Rochester Cathedral. Couldn’t they be bothered to pull out the pulpit and do the job properly? Or perhaps they got called away on a more urgent job, a shrine to be smashed up, saint’s bones to be chucked in the rubbish heap, Our Lady’s lilies to be chiseled out somewhere?

Those medieval folks! With their love of bright colours and stories and superstitions. What was Queen Fortuna, smiling at the revolutions of her wheel, doing in a Christian temple, anyway? Pagan goddess, pagan symbolism. Except that by this time she had been thoroughly Christianised as an agent of Providence. Men’s fortunes were not random but made sense within the Divine Scheme. Thank Boethius, whose work The Consolation of Philosophy enabled a bridge between pagan Stoicism and Christian humility.

It was fortunate indeed that part of this wall painting survives for us to admire. It could have vanished but for Lady Luck, who smiled on herself that day.

Family summer holidays in my childhood were always spent in seaside bed-and-breakfasts or rented rooms. We never stayed in hotels, and we certainly never went abroad. Hotels were too expensive and ‘abroad’ was impossibly exotic. Besides, neither of my parents had a passport. It was the same for the extended family. Although an (child-less) aunt and uncle, who had good jobs with British Rail, once went to Spain for a week. I remember a single, small photograph of them being passed around at a family gathering. I guess it must have been taken by a beach photographer because neither of them owned a camera. There they were, pink-faced and fully clothed, sitting in deck chairs, smiling at their sheer good fortune. The most remarkable thing about the picture to my childish eyes was how hot and sunny it looked. Nothing like Bognor Regis or Clacton-on-Sea.

Foreign travel wasn’t really something I thought about until, as a teenager, I read my way through the James Bond corpus. I acquired the complete set of Pan paperbacks, with the classic Raymond Hawkey covers, at school jumble sales. Bond went everywhere, flying BEA or BOAC, on Her Majesty’s secret service. Of course, these were business trips rather than holidays. But whether it was the France of Casino Royale, the United States of Diamonds Are Forever, the Jamaica of Dr No, or the Turkey of From Russia With Love, I was fascinated with Bond-world. Not just the exotic locations, but the hotels, the food, the drink, the cars, the weapons, the villain’s lairs — and, of course, the beautiful, mysterious women.

Bond was a dedicated secret agent who worked hard and risked everything in the line of duty, but knew how to enjoy life, from his cigarettes — ‘a Balkan and Turkish mix made for him by Morlands of Grosvenor Street’ — to his battleship-grey convertible coupé — ‘one of the last of the 4½-litre Bentleys with the supercharger by Amherst Villiers’. Ian Fleming was very good at this kind of practical detail. From Casino Royale, to take one example, I learnt how to navigate a casino, how to play baccarat, and how a dry martini should be made, or rather, how Bond thought a dry martini should be made.

The Covid-19 lockdown (remember that?) made me think again about armchair travel, about how the mind can wander abroad even when the body is constrained, and about the extent to which books can both feed and satisfy the urge for new vistas and new experiences. Though real life is never like books, even non-fiction ones. Now that I’m older and more experienced, I’m as familiar with the boredom and inconvenience of travel as I am with its pleasures. I’ve never experienced the dangerous glamour of a Bond jaunt, and I’ve never dealt with hazard and hostility as capably as he did. Bond, the original Bond, an example of unapologetic twentieth-century masculinity, is deeply unfashionable now, not to say despised. But not by me.

I’ve now published five videos on my new YouTube channel, and I thought I’d list them here for ease of reference. There are more to come, so I’ll make this a regular section in forthcoming newsletters.