Every year at this time the air smells just that bit fresher, newly unfurled leaves seem greener than you recall, the daffodils are just that bit more dazzling, their trumpets bobbing up and down in the breeze as if announcing …

I am so very many miles from where I was living last November, almost 5000 miles from Lourmarin in Provence, France. Yet as I drive around the sun-drenched, autumnal vineyards of California’s Napa Valley the countryside is not so very …

When I wrote my first thoughts about living in Lourmarin, in Provence, France, I asked: ‘when do you know that you are somewhere special and what makes a place special?’ Of course the answer is different for all of us. …