IT is not always heavenly in Paradise, the imaginative name of the makeshift ‘resort’ at which we are staying on Sri Lanka’s south coast.

I DO not wish to belabour my readers on the theme of fruit bats, but when one sees them in sixes and sevens against the night sky, as big as egrets and flying with the same, slow wing-beats as herons, they warrant a few lines.

THERE are extensions and conversions that follow the line of a given house, blending the architecture of the old to the new in a seamless join.