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I was recently lent the latest Subaru Forester to test drive, and I enjoyed its sturdiness, its space and the frugality of its 2.0 hybrid engine. But as my mileage progressed over the course of a week’s bombing around the back roads of north Norfolk, I started to have a hankering for a nose ring, a tattoo of interlocking female glyphs, and to dye my hair pink and blue and wear dungarees. I put on a k.d. lang playlist, drove home, and watched Angelina Jolie in Gia. Was the Subaru turning me – a bloke, with no unusual pronouns – into a lesbian? Let me explain. In the 1990s, Subaru

Why do we allow our public spaces to be taken over by chuggers? Whenever I exit my office above Charing Cross station in search of lunch, I am immediately confronted by no fewer than three charity muggers – each decked out in a garish uniform promoting whichever charity they are being paid for that day. It is best to avoid eye-contact – otherwise prepare to be bombarded with a flurry of phoney scripted sales patter. ‘Didn’t we go to primary school together?’ Unlikely, I suggest, given our age difference. ‘Still, it must be a big school given you said the exact same thing to the fella five paces in front

In Alex Garland’s new film Warfare, one detail stakes the film’s claim to be the most honest depiction of combat yet. Not the severed foot left lying on an Iraqi street after a bomb blast, nor a wounded US soldier’s screams as a medic bandages up what is left of his leg. Instead, it is that throughout the film’s 20-minute-long gun battle, only one insurgent is shown being felled by a bullet. In real-life combat, enemy fighters do not obligingly linger centre stage – they lurk behind cover, as hard to get a bead on as possible. This was particularly true of Iraq, where most of the fighting was against

Right beside the airport I often use to fly home from Italy, there is a pod hotel where I am becoming a regular client. These, as most will know, are dirt-cheap places where sleep is stripped down to its absolute core. For about £35 a night here, you get a tiny berth of a room – a ‘capsule’ about 4ft wide and 6.5ft long – with a narrow bed, a socket to recharge your devices and, if you want to work, a fold-down mini-table for your laptop. It is a bit like you imagine a rather poky Swedish prison cell, decorated with Nordic minimalism: white bed, white walls, fluorescent light,

The news that Terry Pratchett’s 2002 novel Night Watch has joined the ranks of the Penguin Modern Classics series may seem, to the Pratchett uninitiated, something of an eyebrow-raiser. Penguin has proudly announced that the book ‘which draws on inspirations as far ranging as Victor Hugo and M*A*S*H, is… a profoundly empathetic novel about community, connection and the tenacity of the human spirit’ and that it was ‘written at the height of Pratchett’s imaginative powers’. All this may very well be true. But many people, even those millions well disposed towards Pratchett, might be asking another question: why this book, and why now? During his lifetime, Pratchett built on the legacy of

Without much fanfare, the Nokia phone has died. I got my first mobile phone, a Nokia, at an age that is by most lights too young. I was in what Americans call the fourth grade, which means I was ten or 11. The phone in question was a cutting-edge Nokia 6820, which a contemporary Nokia press release claims was ‘specifically designed for enterprise use, with a full keyboard to offer faster text-input and easy navigation for advanced messaging like mobile e-mail’. I certainly had never sent an email at that stage in my life, and I operated no enterprises.   At first I thought very little of that phone, by