There’s someone even more unpopular than us!
‘Good news! There’s someone even more unpopular than us!’
Uncategorized
Wednesday
A single vent would be better
We’ve decided to delay having a child until you retire
‘With the cost of child care, we’ve decided to delay having a child until you retire.’
Dog whistles
‘I don’t answer to dog whistles, bigot!’
The fetishisation of failure
Awhile back, I followed the career of the writer Elizabeth Day, but not in a good way; rather, I followed it much as a fly must have followed a muck-cart in the olden days. Her column for the Mail on Sunday, from 2018 to 2021, was quite probably the worst column ever to appear in a newspaper up to that point. I dubbed her The World’s Worst Columnist (and it wasn’t envy, as I had a cushy billet at the Sunday Telegraph at the time) and took great delight in sharing the choice cherries of triteness atop her weekly Sunday sundae of banality with my mates on social media. She
Celibacy isn’t chic
Abstinence doesn’t typically come to mind when one thinks of Valentine’s Day. But this year it coincides with Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, when we traditionally give something up. (Bear in mind that Christianity recognises a very gruesome torture and death as the ultimate gesture of love. For us, a little bit of suffering seems perfectly in order on a day celebrating love.) White-knuckled sex positivity isn’t serving women’s spiritual needs I was still in Catholic school in Virginia the last time the two days collided. We were, like all teenagers, obsessed with love and fixated on our own nascent desires, although this obsession manifested in strange ways.
Inside Kelly Castle (baronetcy optional)
For most of us, a cursory flick through an in-flight magazine might lead to the purchase of a G&T, or a bottle of perfume. For Alun Grassick, it was a slightly more substantial investment. When he spotted an ad for a crumbling B Listed castle in the Angus countryside, with its towers, turrets, an associated baronetcy and 33 acres of land, he and his wife bought the property. Since 2001, they have spent an eye-watering £2 million restoring it. The couple had long hankered for a second home in their native country since moving to Hong Kong in the late 1980s. ‘I always had aspirations of owning a large property
Tuesday
The tyranny of the 20mph limit
I was still thinking about the film when I came out of the cinema and got into my car. I can’t have exceeded 28mph. On this wide, well-lit, almost empty London road at midnight, it was hardly reckless. Nevertheless, this stretch of road is one of hundreds to have had their speed limits reduced from 30mph to 20mph. Had I driven past a camera while reflecting on the ambiguous ending of All Of Us Strangers? I now face an anxious few weeks waiting to find out. When I mentioned this to friends I discovered this anxiety is now a common experience. The last time I got the dreaded speed camera
It’s official: modern music is bad
It’s one of the hoariest cliches in popular culture: that every fading generation must, in flailing anger at its own imminent irrelevance, turn on the next generation and say, ‘your music is dire’. From the crusty judge contemptuously asking ‘who are these Beatles’, to the middle-aged outrage surrounding the spitting and pogoing Sex Pistols, to the Tory MP who expressed his horror at the Beastie Boys and Run DMC for ‘mocking disabled children in Montreux’, it is an established human tradition. And of course, it is always nonsense. It turns out the next generation has music of equal brilliance, passion, vivacity, excitement. Pop music once commonly expressed joy, love, energy,
I’m trapped by the village WhatsApp
I live in a village in Oxfordshire. Before we moved here, a WhatsApp group was set up to help the community navigate the pandemic. It was, other villagers tell me, a lifeline. But the village WhatsApp is still going. No longer a herald of government diktats, it is now a busy forum with photos of abandoned parcels, a slow cooker in an unknown kitchen, someone’s cat staring blankly at me, and, most worryingly, a snap of the village playground littered with beer cans. The WhatsApp group seems to have exposed the realities of the rural social contract There are village announcements too, stories of the occasional lost dog and items that people
Monday
French cheese is dying. Good riddance
Every Thursday morning at Washington Dulles Airport, a French government Airbus disgorges a metal freight container under diplomatic seal. Bypassing US customs inspection, it is transported directly to the French Embassy compound in Georgetown. At midday, elite French diplomats gather to watch as the precious content is unsealed. Spain thrashed France at the 2023 World Cheese Awards Along with the diplomatic papers, direct from the Quai d’Orsay, cheese is delivered weekly for French officials in the United States capital, a country where unpasteurised cheese is cruelly banned. Embassy staff put in their orders a week in advance and get delivered individual baskets of Comte, Reblochon and the soft, smoky goat’s cheese
Football doesn’t need a blue card
Football is becoming a testing ground for every madcap idea the supposed guardians of the sport can come up with. The latest is the blue card, a stopgap between the yellow and red cards for bookings and sendings off, designed to send players to a sin bin for ten minutes should they commit one of two offences: dissent or cynical fouls to prevent a goalscoring opportunity. It’s clearly designed to jazz up the game for a global television audience Sure, it works in rugby and ice hockey and something called roller derby where a brief period of numerical advantage can make a big difference. But as any football fan knows,
Why we’ve come to love Camilla
Could it be that Queen Camilla has quietly, after all these years, been accepted by the British people? We’ve watched her navigate the past turbulent days with dignity and grit, just ploughing on with her public duties and keeping the drama low. I suspect that her steady-Eddy style is going down well, particularly since it’s now clear that the woman is a grafter, and we like a grafter. How admirable her low-key style seems when compared to the antics of the Sussexes Looking back, we could see that she was a first-class trooper at the end of January when she opened a new Maggie Centre at the Royal Free Hospital
Friday
Two soft-ground specialists for Newbury
The heavy rain of the past 48 hours is good news for two horses that I fancy for the ultra-competitive Betfair Hurdle tomorrow (Newbury, 3.15 p.m.). The ground is now ‘heavy, soft in places’ and more rain forecast later today. I put up BRENTFORD HOPE at 14-1 for the race four weeks ago and his best form on the Flat means that he is well weighted over hurdles, particularly now that he has his favoured cut in the ground. His trainer, Harry Derham, is in sparkling from with three winners from 11 runners in the past fortnight, for a 27 per cent strike rate. I still like his price of
Why Trump loves The Smiths
Donald Trump and The Smiths make, you would think, very unlikely bedfellows. Recently a mini-kerfuffle broke out over a Smiths song – ‘Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want’ – playing over the tannoy at a Trump rally as part of the warm-up. Saying the unsayable, saying what we wish we could say, is a very attractive quality Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr was certainly taken aback. ‘I never in a million years would’ve thought this could come to pass,’ he tweeted after seeing video footage of the song being piped from a South Dakota MAGA stage. ‘Consider this shit shut right down right now.’ (It’s unclear what he’s
Why don’t my local police work nights?
Every few weeks, I leave my front door to find a car missing its side window and a pile of glass on the pavement. One morning there were four windowless cars, all in a row; someone had already been out with duct tape and some bin bags in an attempt to keep the rain from their back seats. The debris from these thefts is just another feature of our London street, like the confetti from Chelsea’s Registry Office which flutters all the way down the King’s Road. But last Wednesday, at 8.15 p.m. to be exact, I witnessed my first attempted smash and grab. There’s something vindictive about law breaking.
Britain’s Italian restaurants are rubbish
You are in an Italian restaurant when a waiter appears brandishing a giant pepper grinder. The spaghetti carbonara is made with cream and garnished with a sprig of parsley. You suddenly realise that you are not, after all, in the Tuscan hills, but somewhere in the UK. An Italian restaurant in London will serve you a cappuccino after dinner Is it possible for Italian restaurants in the UK to be authentic? Some of the Greek restaurants in London I’ve eaten in are so much the real deal that I have managed to forget I’m not in Athens. Similarly, some of the Spanish restaurants – such as those on Portobello Road
Wednesday
Are you a PopCon
‘Are you a PopCon, a New Con or just a Con?’
