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Friday

David Willis

Is this the end of Burning Man?

In the summer of 1986, two men, Larry Harvey and Jerry James, built an eight-foot-tall wooden effigy of a man and set fire to it on a beach in San Francisco. The event – an impromptu bonfire attended by several dozen of their closest friends – spawned what has since become a cultural phenomenon: an event seen by some as the ultimate rejection of capitalism, and by others as a giant drug-fuelled knees-up in the desert.  I’ve noticed the changes in the six years that I have been going to Burning Man Thirty-seven years on, Burning Man still culminates in the razing of a wooden sculpture, but since then both

Wednesday

Paul Burke

The tyranny of the tidy

A few years ago, James Delingpole and I were two-fifths of ‘The Manalysts’ a clique of agony uncles employed by a women’s magazine. The idea was to provide five answers to each problem from five disparate standpoints. James was the trenchant intellectual, I was (supposedly) the metrosexual adman and the other three were a practising psychotherapist, a blokey builder from Essex and a gloriously camp hairdresser. The great fallacy about untidy people is that we’re always losing things A fair few of our correspondents were, unsurprisingly, complaining about a boyfriend or husband’s untidiness but I remember being struck by how many wrote in to bemoan the very opposite – the

James Innes-Smith

A guide to London’s hotel restaurants

Hotel restaurants have come a long way since they were dingy add-ons geared towards a captive audience, once the preserve of holidaymakers too lazy to leave the lobby. London is in the midst of a literal feeding frenzy of swish new hotel restaurant openings. The whole ‘dining experience’ – what is dining if not an experience? – has become a way for hard-pressed hoteliers keen to make a bit of extra cash. My dream has always been to live in a grand London hotel with every whim catered for. The dowdy old Dorchester, once a second home to reprobates such as Burton and Taylor, always held a particular appeal, even

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

How much rum can you drink on St Kitts?

It all proved too much for Mrs Ray. We were in St Kitts and Nevis for a week-long Caribbean break and on the flight over I’d wondered aloud how early each day it would be acceptable to start on the rum. I soon got my answer.  Having misguidedly checked in to the St Kitts Marriott Resort – a vast, half-empty hangar of a place complete with plump, elderly Americans whirring by on mobility scooters; an over-priced restaurant serving only that which was deep-fried; and a deserted poolside bar peddling watery rum punches and a casino that smelt of damp and despair – our spirits were further flattened by finding that

Tuesday

Jake Wallis Simons Jake Wallis Simons

What’s wrong with calling food Israeli?

The service was stylish, the menu superb, the vibe effortlessly chic. This was the Coal Office, one of London’s best Israeli restaurants, situated in the old Victorian goods yard at King’s Cross. My fiancée and I dined there last week. It was a blast. But something didn’t feel right.  Fish and chips was invented by an Ashkenazi Jew, and we all like a good kedgeree or a korma, yet British food is no fiction In many ways, you couldn’t find a more Israeli establishment. Weeks earlier, In Jerusalem, I had taken my children to the Coal Office’s sister restaurant, Machneyuda. The same type of stuff was on the plate: Sephardi spices, chickpeas

John Sturgis

Alone in Dartmoor’s haunted woods

Wistman’s Wood is one of the UK’s last remaining temperate rainforests. It came within Prince William’s purview after he inherited the Duchy of Cornwall, the largest privately owned portion of Dartmoor National Park. He has since visited the site, a seven-acre strip of oak woodland on the eastern slopes of the West Dart Valley, posing for photos in a waxed jacket and tweed cap. Wistman’s is a unique habitat. It has a number of rare mosses and lichens which attach themselves to and around its stunted, gnarly oaks and the large boulders dotted among them. But it is as much its place in folklore as natural history that makes Wistman’s