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Let me tell you a ghost story. I began texting Becky two weeks ago. Soon the messages were flowing. A date was set, a table booked. Friday night. Soho. Here we go. Then, a day before the date, the texts stopped and the lady vanished – leaving me to cancel the restaurant and spend the evening in the company of Wordle. It might be ten years since ‘ghosting’ was added to the dictionary, but the disappearing act has lost none of its sting. It’s also as common as ever: four out of five singletons say they’ve been ghosted. Received wisdom blames the apps. The industrial scale of dating today causes

We British are not famed for culinary daring. An adventurous meal has traditionally been one that lacks potatoes. Nose-to-tail eating is mostly anathema to a nation that prefers the blandest part of the chicken because it’s the easiest to cut up. Poverty and shortage were not enough to spur our creativity during postwar rationing. The food writer Elizabeth David recounted a Scottish schoolmaster’s wife who recoiled in horror at her freshly gathered chanterelles. A fisherman did the same on spotting her with a crab, both reacting with the same appalled cry: ‘You’re never going to eat those dirty things?’ Few in Britain praise dishes of pig’s ears or chicken knees,

Once at my old local paper, the Grimsby Evening Telegraph, a trainee made the mistake of sniggering when asked to cover the allotments sub-committee. ‘Don’t ever fuck with allotment holders,’ the news editor warned. ‘It may not matter to you, but they take those little patches of land very seriously indeed.’ Like most of the news editor’s salty words of wisdom, this advice was forged on the anvil of bitter experience. Grimsby’s allotmenteers guarded their marrow and runner bean patches with a Balkan-esque blood-and-soil passion. The slightest mistake could generate no end of angry phone calls and green-ink letters. I am not sure allotment coverage was quite what King Charles

The French claim authorship of April Fool’s Day, dating it to the late Middle Ages. Back then, those who celebrated the year’s beginning on 1 January under the new Julian Calendar made fun of those who still went by the old one. A paper fish was attached to the unsuspecting backs of Gregorian diehards and the festival became known as Poisson d’Avril. The joke has been somewhat lost in the intervening centuries, denoting either the start of the fishing season, the astrological symbol for late March, or some play on the phrase ‘taking the bait’. The era of mass media has seen many of us become April Fools (or fish).

Let’s say you’re a young woman working in London, and you own a one-bedroom flat in Islington. You fall in love with a chap who has a nice house in Devon. You marry him.  As soon as you do that, you’ll no longer be allowed to park your car outside your Islington flat in the daytime, except on a meter for a maximum stay of two hours. A married couple is only permitted one primary residence between them, and the larger country house will most likely be designated the main home. In all central London boroughs (not just Camden as in this example), you’re not eligible for a resident’s parking

‘You need to get yourself tested’, my wife said after yet another of my lapses, ‘you’re fast becoming a marble-free zone.’ I couldn’t disagree. Perhaps the relentless ‘mental ’elf’ craze had alerted me to my own flaws, though groping for names and words is, surely, excusable by 67. But I would often devour a book and, days later, struggle to remember not just title, author and plot but whether or not I’d actually read it. And could I reconstruct last week’s events, even in outline? No, of course I couldn’t. The health insurer confirmed they do indeed ‘provide support for that’, the cost counting against my annual limit. I therefore

Have you ever looked after a child that doesn’t nap from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m.? I have. Just to be clear, I’m talking about a 14-hour day with no relief whatsoever from grannies, nannies or DHs, the ghastly acronym that Mumsnet uses for fathers to signify ‘darling husband’. Next question: have you ever looked after a child for the standard 14-hour shift and not turned a screen on? Don’t lie, because no mother on this planet will ever believe you. Seasoned mothers know that the only way to make it to the business end of the day – 5 p.m., give or take – is to fill chunks of