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It’s just a moderately sized town in Kent, but Tunbridge Wells seems to have a literary status disproportionate to its size. And, perhaps as a corollary, it seems to occur in fiction much more frequently than considerably bigger towns of otherwise greater significance. Or certainly this has been my impression over a lifetime’s reading.  I recall, for example, almost falling out of my chair when it suddenly featured in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow The town has numerous literary connections. Thackeray lived there and set part of his The Virginians in the town. Dickens visited, as did Jane Austen – her brother is buried there. And it’s surrounded by smaller towns and villages

‘She’s the kind of girl you wish lived next door, but she’s never going to,’ said the photographer David Bailey, speaking about the supermodel Kate Moss, who turned 50 this week. Moss has for three decades been a magnet for tabloid gossip and a muse to culturally influential people.Marc Quinn made sculptures out of her in 18-carat gold and she often sat for Lucian Freud. Even when flagrantly selling out – see for instance, her recent campaign for Diet Coke – she somehow manages to keep her cool Envied by some and lusted after by many, Moss was throughout her modelling career a rebel with a single cause: to have a

Due to my rather efficacious dabbling in semaglutides last summer, I’m currently on the mailing list of several online pharmacies, and the other day I received an email making me aware of the existence of ‘fit notes’ – ‘formerly known as sick notes’ – following ‘an appropriate online consultation with one of our GPs’. The consultation alone would cost me £14.95 and should I receive validation as an invalid, a ‘fit note’ would then be offered to me for £19.95, so that’s the best part of £35 quid in order to pull a sickie. I know someone who appears to go up a dress size every time she buys a new

As we celebrate 120 years of aviation with a plug door and several iPhones tumbling from an in-flight spanking-new Boeing 737 Max, and a new Airbus A350 burning to a cinder in Tokyo, it is fair to note that not a single passenger was killed in either incident (although four Japanese coast guards perished on the ground). When I started flying it was glamourous, exciting and genuinely dangerous. An actual pilot. Some kind of God. I stood there hypnotised by the illuminated dials and the throbbing turboprops Not so long ago in the annals of human civilisation, on 13 December, 1903, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright, a bicycle