It wouldn't be summer without warm curtains of rain sweeping the beaches, says the poet and broadcaster, Theo Dorgan

"It wouldn't be summer without warm curtains of rain sweeping

the beaches, children running through the rain into the dimpled pewter sea. It wouldn't be summer without these vertiginous onsets of memory: long silver afternoons of boredom lit by the sudden appearance at the garden gate of a first love. It wouldn't be summer without this play of child and

adult, everything cast and recast in perpetual light, nothing ever lost."

When in Vietnam. . .

After you have finished your meal, do not be tempted to leave chopsticks standing up in a bowl of unfinished rice. To locals, it looks like the incense sticks that are burned for the dead and is therefore a mark of disrespect.

Rosita Boland