The Duke of Wellington, James Bond and a very English crime
Do you remember the scene from the James Bond film Dr. No, where 007 goes to meet the villain in his Caribbean lair and does a double-take on a picture…
Category Archives: Writing Courses
The iris is ris! Springtime at the Watermill
Some beautiful warm, sunny days around Easter and into April have enabled us to enjoy lunching and dining a fuori with friends on our Riverside Terrace, under the blue Italian…
Happy to compete and wanting to win. How ‘lefties’ survive in a right-handed world
It’s a curious thing, but even after eons of evolution we left-handers still make up about one-tenth of the world’s population. Is it because we are just ‘ornery’? You would…
We’ll cut ourselves in four and go the extra mile to bring you the best at the Watermill
You’ll find the hospitality the Watermill second to none and we’ll cut ourselves in four to make sure you are well looked after. Not literally, of course, but ci faremo…
Colourful language, or why the Italians go green when they are in the red
Most languages have colourful expressions, and many of them are much the same: we’re green with envy, while Italians talk of verde dall’invidia; if we want to be clear we…
Happy Lupercalia: was this the boisterous precursor to St. Valentine’s Day?
I don’t know about you, but I’m not planning to sacrifice a goat today nor, fun though it sounds, run semi-naked through the city flaying bystanders with strips from the…
An unique Taste of Tuscany and intriguing ‘taste’ of AI
[It really is Bill writing this blog!] I never use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in my Watermill blogs, believing that la voce narrante, the narrator’s voice, should be individual and idiosyncratic:…
A ‘Zen’ experience beside a Tuscan river: The Watermill’s bamboo glade
Silently and unseen, the leaves have fallen for more than half a century in our bamboo glade between the millstream and the river, creating a cushioned pathway through the towering…
A bicycle made for two
A tandem bicycle, a friend, and a spark of creativity I don’t know whether you have ever been on a tandem bicycle, but in my experience, you need a good…
Bring your NPP to the Watermill. Latest attraction: bicycling in the hills around us, without the hard work
Do you have an NPP? We are always delighted to welcome them to the Watermill, as well as NKPs, NWPs and NILPs! (For the uninitiated, that’s Non-Painting Partners, Non-Knitting Partners,…
Will more sales come tumbling down for Bill’s book?
Learning to blow one’s own trumpet doesn’t come easy to Englishmen like Bill, who are taught diffidence from the year dot. But when a man you admire gives unstinting…
It’s bad luck to wish Italians good luck. Cry wolf instead
In our part of Italy most people think that wishing somebody ‘good luck’ is bad news, believing that doing so is likely to have precisely the opposite effect. So when it…