Society

The Americans are weird about salad. I’m sorry, but somebody had to say it. Really, their use of the word ‘salad’ needs scare quotes around it. Where we generally mean ‘green leaves, and possibly a tomato if we’re feeling adventurous’, an American ‘salad’ can mean anything from pistachio cream with glacé cherries to tuna in sweet jelly. It is a hangover from the middle of the last century, when – in a perfect confluence – canned goods, especially otherwise unavailable fruit, and mass-produced gelatine simultaneously became easily available. The American housewife ran with it, and inexplicably called it a salad. Salad can be maximalist, with everything thrown at it. Bacon!

I hadn’t intended to go on a ‘staycation’ this summer. Quite the contrary, I’d booked a family holiday to Norway. Last August, I made the mistake of renting a villa in Majorca and it was so hot it was impossible to do anything, including sleep. So this year I insisted on going north and arranged to borrow a log cabin near Trondheim. The two oldest children were so unimpressed – they loved the nightlife in Majorca – that they refused to come, which was fine by me. The flights were £200 each way and it meant we only had to rent a Fiat Uno instead of a six-seater. One of

Time to come clean: I really like the Hundred. This is the sort of view that normally makes people look at you as if you had just professed an admiration for Gary Glitter. But come on, this is a crisp little short-form cricket tournament, played out at the height of summer to largely packed houses. What really is not to like? Cricket is one of the few sports that works in different formats, so it beats me why the Hundred arouses such venom. It has done wonders for the women’s game, it doesn’t take long and it is all televised – much of it on terrestrial TV. Crucially, it has