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Farewell then, the Crooked House. The 18th-century pub, in the West Midlands village of Himley, hasn’t just stopped being a pub – it’s stopped existing, full stop. Just days after its sale to a private buyer for ‘alternative use’, the famously wonky building – where coins and marbles appeared to roll uphill – was gutted by fire and has now been demolished. Unsurprisingly this has given rise to suspicions aplenty, but we’re taking it as a chance to celebrate Britain’s oddest pubs. Step this way for underground tunnels, pubs without bars – and some very single-minded landlords… Oliver Cromwell spent a night here and Inspector Morse visited in a 1990

John Brierley, who died last month, was a legendary pilgrim that you’ve probably never heard of. Admittedly, these days most people aren’t familiar with any pilgrims. Just going to Sunday mass is unorthodox. The vast majority of us who respected Brierley never met him and probably, like me, never saw a video clip of him or even heard him talk. We knew him only from his series of Camino de Santiago guidebooks. But that was enough. Having been translated into numerous languages and sold around a million copies, his books shepherded countless pilgrims like me on their long travels across continental Europe toward the remarkable city of Santiago de Compostela

One Sunday morning, in an upmarket bakery packed to the hilt with women clutching yoga mats and men proudly carrying papoose-swaddled babies, I glanced around in search of a fresh loaf to serve for lunch. I saw the myriad of shapes, sizes, colours and textures of the loaves on display, and then noticed something. All but one, a seeded rye, were variations on the dreaded sourdough. When it was my turn to be served, I asked ‘Is there anything in the shop except for damned sourdough?’ Judging by the disgusted looks that came my way, I might as well have been asking whether anyone fancied kicking a few homeless people

One of the few highlights of newly-released Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a frantic chase through 1960s Tangier. It’s breathless, edge-of-the-seat stuff with tuk-tuks, motorcycles, a Jaguar and Mercedes tearing through the narrow streets of the medina, guns blazing and quips flying. I’m told so many tuk-tuks got mangled they needed dozens to shoot the scene.  In the medina, we wandered the crammed, twisting streets full of bustling locals, tired dogs, stray cats and laughing children What a crushing disappointment, then, to discover that the sequence was filmed not in Tangier at all but in Fez and Oujda. The 1987 Bond film, The Living Daylights, was filmed in Tangier, as

I felt a flash of affection reading that Boris Johnson’s plan to build an outdoor swimming pool at his second home in Oxfordshire may be stalled by the presence of great crested newts. What a very Bojo situation; seeing the big picture, seeking fun, determined to do things large – but hampered all the way. Carrie will probably have told him that it will be lovely for their three kiddies and that they’ll save a fortune on days out in the school holidays. But, trust me, as someone who was owned by a swimming pool for the best part of a decade, this may well be one folly too far,

In 1884, William Morris gave a lecture to the Hampstead Liberal Club with the title of ‘Useful Work Versus Useless Toil’. His remarks were typically damning of what he saw as the crude philistinism of Victorian capitalism with its mass production of fripperies and of what Marxists call the alienation of labour – the psychological and material disconnection between the worker and the product of his work. Morris offered an alternative, utopian vision, in which everyone would have access to fulfilling, productive work suited to their skills and nature and where there would be no idle rich and no boss class stealing the value of the labour of the working

Your starter for ten: who on earth thought it a good idea to hire Ross Kemp to present a quiz show? Or Gary Lineker? Or Lucy Worsley? And don’t get me started on Amol Rajan. Back in the mists of time, the general rule was to hire either specialist  – Nicholas Parsons and Robert Robinson for instance, who had cut their teeth on similar roles before moving to TV – or popular stand-up comics such as Bob Monkhouse and Bruce Forsyth who knew how to ad lib. Now the television commissioners seem intent on ramming square pegs into round holes. Kemp, a former EastEnders star, may be a passable soap actor and

I’m a born and bred Minnesotan, a state settled by Norwegians, Swedes and Germans and a spattering of Finns, Poles and Russians. They recognised their homeland in the frigid winter tundra and bountiful farmland and their hearty culinary traditions prevailed just as the homesteaders did. Up until a few decades ago, before organised religion took a real hit, the local Lutheran church basement was where families and friends congregated to share coffee, sweet baked goods and savory bites. And as renowned as the silver-haired grandmothers who ran the church’s Women’s Auxiliary were the massive amounts of strange delicacies they produced for expectant crowds. Lefse was generally reserved for special occasions.