Society

While Sunday’s Test farce reverberated far beyond Surrey’s Oval, that county’s favourite son, veteran Mark Ramprakash, was serenely toasting his achievement in becoming the first English batsman to score 2,000 first-class runs in a summer since he did the very same 11 years ago. Good show. It used to be a routine mark for leading county batsmen. Hobbs did it on 17 occasions, Sutcliffe and Hendren 15. In my boyhood, 2,000 was almost commonplace. Sixty summers ago, for instance, the two grand was posted by Laurie Fishlock, Vijay Merchant, Jack Robertson, Tom Barling, Dennis Brookes and Walter Keeton, with the two Test players back from the war, Denis Compton (2,403)

SydneyI am here to announce a new stage show. When last here I was having breakfast in a harbourside café with a composer friend and I was just telling him about a particularly vile freelance paparazzo who haunted the area. Suddenly I saw the glint of a telephoto lens across the street. It was him! Emerging from the restaurant at a brisk pace I saw the wretch jogging towards me, grey ponytail threshing and camera rampant. He got so close I could smell the morning drink on his breath. The spirits of Russell Crowe, Sean Penn and Kate Moss suddenly inhabited me, and in trying to brush aside the intrusive

There is more to 19th-century ballet than fluttering sylphs, spectral broken-hearted peasant girls and doomed feathery princesses. There is comedy and fun, too. Take the 1869 classic Don Quixote, a Spanish romp loosely based on Miguel de Cervantes’ literary masterpiece. The ballet was Marius Petipa’s second major work — the first being The Pharaoh’s Daughter (which I reviewed a fortnight ago) — and it gave its first Russian audiences definitive proof of Petipa’s choreographic talent and theatrical genius. Not many comic or comedy ballets have stood the test of time, thus prompting the erroneous but widespread belief that 19th-century ballet is mostly about tear-jerking stuff. Luckily, Don Q (as it

Q. I was recently invited to stay with some well-heeled friends who were renting a house in Tuscany. Having cleared up any possible confusion about payment (I wouldn’t have to contribute to the rent), I accepted their invitation. Early one evening I was strolling on to the balcony of my bedroom, reading Juliet Nicolson’s A Perfect Summer, when I walked straight through a large metal mosquito net fitted across the doorframe. Sunglasses, iPod, panama and book were flung across the balcony as the entire structure collapsed around me. After several failed attempts to reassemble it and hearing my hosts calling me down for poolside drinks, I panicked and shoved the

Mexico City/Punta Ixtapa This summer my family have done a life-swap. Every day we eat a large breakfast prepared by the cook, Isabel, in our residence in Mexico City, while Gaby, the maid, tidies our bedrooms. A brace of gardeners in cowboy hats, José and José-Luis, arrive shortly thereafter to fish out bougainvillea blooms from the fishpond. Another José, the driver, awaits our instructions. A beach house in Ixtapa (which means white sand in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs) is also at our disposal, with a cook and a maid. Not speaking the language, I talk to the staff in pidgin Latin and they reply in fast Spanish. It