The restaurant, Da Divo, had been highly recommended. One of the best in Siena, some said. We ordered, nervously. We’d had some antipasti earlier. We only wanted primi. My travelling companion ordered the wild boar pasta. I had gnocchi with seafood sauce, over a bed of sauteed kale. What fun! It took an age…

I spent two years living in England as a kid. I can still recall so many tastes and smells: Bird’s Custard, yellow and smooth, floating over and around an apple crumble. The little bottles of milk and foil-wrapped biscuits they gave us every morning at school. Lime cordial. Shandy. Hovis bread.The smell of hedges,…

The air….aromatherapy with the smell of lilacs salt water honeysuckle and the light gold at the edges of the day swathes of green sloping up to robin’s egg blue sky flowers in front of every house, an embarrassment of riches and of the course the ocean (succulent Fanny Bay oysters fried up and loaded…