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It’s the flash that shocks you first. It’s night and you’re driving in the outside lane of the motorway at a speed that isn’t exactly the national limit, but isn’t so wildly in excess that it would raise eyebrows. Suddenly your car floods with the light of a thousand suns. The flash in the rear-view mirror alone is enough to dazzle. It’s not a speed camera – you know from bitter experience that it’s too fast, too furious for that. Has Putin detonated a tactical nuke over the last junction? That would actually feel less threatening. The flash comes again, and as your eyes readjust the mirror shows a pair

No-one seems to like tourists any more. This week Venice introduced its €5 entry charge – which merely buys you the right to go into the city and be ripped off by cafes and restaurants. On Tenerife, residents have been marching and daubing slogans on the walls ‘tourist – go home’. So much for free movement. Meanwhile, in Japan, a village near Mount Fuji is so fed up with Instagrammers that it is erecting a giant screen to hide the mountain. Happy holidays! It was a trudge over ash and glacial gravels – which make for surprisingly easy walking Not to worry. If you want to go somewhere where you won’t bother the

A year or so ago my mum, 90, took her cat to the vet. She left an hour later, relieved of nearly £800. Her aged cat it appeared needed tests, a scan and various medicines. My mum lives in a poor area of London and is on a state pension. She has little spare money, but she loves that cat and when a vet says he needs tests, who was she to say no? Most of the other people using that vet are in similar circumstances. I was outraged so rang the HQ of the firm and got through to the medical director who told me he made no apologies for

Street robbery has become an epidemic. Horrible thugs are stealing luxury watches and jewellery in broad daylight. The number of luxury watches stolen almost doubled in England and Wales between 2015 and 2022 – with 25,802 stolen in 2022. The problem is particularly bad in London, where the Metropolitan Police have set up a special unit to tackle the problem. Even the greediest thief isn’t about to strip your suit off your back It’s an unforgivable crime. Lock the muggers up and throw away the key. Of course people should be free to walk the streets, decked in gold and silver. Oh for the legendary days of medieval England when you

I recently had the pleasure of spending some time with my two teenage grandsons, who live in Dorset – 16-year-old Dylan and Isaac, who is 14. Listening to them chatting with their friends, I slowly realised that, half the time, I hadn’t a clue what they were on about. Peculiar words I’d never heard before peppered their ‘convos’. What, I wondered, could be the definitions of ‘leng’ and ‘peng’? What was the meaning behind the mysterious expression ‘SN’? And why did they sometimes exclaim: ‘That’s beg!’ As is the way of the world, a whole new slang vocabulary has been created by their Gen Z. Ah, the groovy bygone days so

My annus horribilis was 1992. I was in fifth grade (aged ten) and had impulsively cut my hair short over the summer. I turned up to school with auburn ringlets billowing out and up from my head in a wavy sphere. Boy did it get the boys going: constant insults, including ‘Ronald McDonald’ (McDonalds’ clown mascot, known for his garish red hair), and heckling with the curiously racist insult ‘electric Afro woman’, shortened to ‘Zofro’. There was no laughing this off: it was a barrage, which came with volleys of burrs thrown at my hair and other projectiles. Only physical violence, months in, quietened it down: I had to kick