Airports are one of the curses of the age we live in. It’s not the flying that’s the headache, it’s the airports. All the same, the endless queues, the terrible shops full of overpriced junk and the heart-stoppingly expensive eateries and bars in the departure lounges are where a bored traveller with an incurable people-watching…

I’d like you to meet Pat. That isn’t Pat’s real name, which is a closely guarded secret. She might be real, or she could be just in my head. I’m not letting on. Pat is my personal reader.  Pat’s in late middle age, not far off retirement. She’s a bookkeeper at a modest-sized company, and…

Going back a few years… When I went to Iceland back in the last century, before mobile phones, email and social media, even before faxes, reading wasn’t always easy. English books were fairly few and far between. It didn’t take long to get through pretty much the whole of the local library’s English-language shelves, and…