ITALIANS love to pin nicknames on their favourite cities like Rome, Venice and Naples – so it says much about Bologna, the pride of northern Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, that it can boast at least three. There’s ‘La Dotta’, the learned one, a reference to its great university, founded in 1088, the oldest in the world,…
EATING out is the answer to eating in as one gets older. As my confidence in my own cooking wanes, and as it takes me longer to organise, invite, shop and cook for an entertainment which lasts only a very few hours, I look with gratitude at all the eating-out possibilities we have around us….
Shaftesbury-born private chef Philippa Davis is back on her travels, most recently in Ireland. She cooked some delicious food – and she explains why she strays occasionally from strictly following recipes. MY latest job was a fast, furious and fun weekend. Having flown across the Irish sea I headed down to County Carlow. I was…
25th January FOR years I have wanted to visit Canada. As a child I awaited the arrival of a magazine called Beautiful British Columbia, every season every year, from a Canadian airman my mother had met in the war. Awesome really was the right word for the huge mountains, stunning sunsets, glistening seas and plunging…
by Simone Sekers TRYING to play the glad game about leaving Brexit, I wondered whether, instead of all those smug Wrecksiteers going on about “getting our country back,” it might be possible to think about getting France back instead. This would restore the magic of that descent from the ferry in to the very heart…
“Welcome to Scotland, Its -6 °C”! the cheerful staff at Enterprise car hire chirped. I think if they had looked closely at my five layers, hat, gloves, fur lined boots, hunched shoulders and hopping around moves, they would have been well aware that I had totally sussed that part of the situation out. Winning top…
AS I write the rain is cascading down the conservatory window outside our office, so it seems like a good time to picture sun-baked, white painted Greek villages and the warm and mouthwatering flavours of the Mediterranean, evoked by Philippa Davis after two weeks working on the Greek island of Paros … When most families…
ONCE in a blue moon, private chef Philippa Davis travels for pleasure rather than work. She has just had a few days in Venice, the location for the brilliant thriller Don’t Look Now, based on a Daphne du Maurier short story, and starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. Fortunately Philippa’s visit involved delicious food adventures…
PHILIPPA Davis has recently returned from her first visit to the Mediterranean island of Sardinia … Sardinia meant a new destination and new client for me so it was very exciting. The initial introductions were done over the phone and it all seemed that it would work out very nicely until … “Oh yes, we…
Philippa Davis finds there is more to Ibiza than drinking and clubbing I felt like a real party pooper as I sat soberly on the plane heading from Edinburgh to Ibiza. It was around midday and the rest of passengers were clearly well on their way to tipsy land. Amusingly as soon as the seatbelt…