Home > The Magazine > Life And Lives

Saturday 22 November 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Slow life

The price is right

Alex James

Wednesday, 12th December 2007

Alex James prepares for Christmas.

The Christmas tree is big enough for the children to climb. The small ones could get lost inside somewhere. Every year that guy gets it exactly right. His expertise is one of the most pleasing things about the run-up to Christmas. The top is an inch from the ceiling. He has an eye for these things. He grows them and he knows them, brings one round on a lorry with bits of rope for lashing it off the banisters. I am a knot man myself, but his tying skills are in a different league, special Christmas-tree knots that fly the thing plumb perpendicular up the festive feng shui leylines. He’s a supreme genius of the spruce genus. Not bad for 50 quid.

Trees belong to the class of things that cost as much as you’re prepared to spend — like pianos. If you’re patient, you can always get a piano for nothing, especially grand pianos. If you need one right away you can buy an upright that will stay in tune for a hundred quid, one that will tune to concert pitch for about a thousand, and it keeps going up from there, way up.

1 | 2 Next page

More articles from: Alex James | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Real life

Melissa Kite

Putting the boot in

Low life

Jeremy Clarke

Rogue quartet

High life

Taki

Love story

Dear Mary

Mary Killen

Your problems solved

Glorious gadgets

Ursula Buchan

Is Christmas creeping up on you, unawares? Again? Have you found yourself, even at this late hour, facing a nil-all draw as far as presents bought, and presents asked for, is concerned? Never mind.

Another Voice

Matthew Parris

I am woken by the song of the kookaburra in this ancient, haunting landscape

Why I’ll never be Warren Buffett

Ross Clark

Ross Clark on investment

A cliché too far

Deborah Ross

Taken
15, Nationwide

A pilgrim’s progress for the 21st century

Mary Wakefield

Mary Wakefield talks to the author William P. Young, whose self-published religious novel has astounded the publishing world and sold nearly two million copies