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Our journey around London’s postcode areas has reached its final destination: WC. One of Evelyn Waugh’s female friends always insisted on referring to it in full as ‘West Central’, because she said ‘WC’ had ‘indelicate associations’. We’ll learn what happened at Spike Milligan’s memorial service, why Agatha Christie married an archaeologist and where you can find the official definition of an inch…

Somewhat by accident, I’ve become a professional glutton. The sort of person who’ll traipse for an hour in the wrong direction, just to try the breakfast burrito that a friend of a friend’s chef boyfriend won’t shut up about. By some miracle, I get to write about it. I’m often asked about the best thing I’ve eaten recently, and where. It’s hard to quantify the exact chemical make-up of the perfect meal, but I know this to be true: it’s the company that makes a place stick. A treasured friend or a spanking new one; a cheeky flirt in a fresh city. I like a busy open kitchen, lighting low

This year’s Cannes Film Festival promises to be interesting viewing, with a record number of female directors in contention (a stark contrast to the 2023 Academy Awards) and a greater than usual representation of old-guard auteurs (including Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Ken Loach and Finnish maverick Aki Kaurismäki). Fans will no doubt be enthused by the return of Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) with his first picture since 2013’s acclaimed Under the Skin. I can’t say Glazer’s choice of material – Martin Amis’s 2014 concentration camp novel Zone of Interest – particularly grabs me, but the director’s work is always worth checking out. This year’s blockbuster spot, meanwhile, will be taken

As King Charles’s stamps begin landing on our doormats more frequently, we’ll be saying goodbye to the familiar Arnold Machin silhouette of Queen Elizabeth II that has appeared on our envelopes for 55 years. But what is less familiar is the story of how that silhouette almost changed dramatically two decades ago.  Early in this millennium, the Royal Mail’s design director, Barry Robinson, led a secret initiative to design a new set of ‘definitive’ stamps – the everyday 1st and 2nd class ones. The aim was to make it easier for visually impaired or partially sighted people to see the class of stamp by making the ‘1’ or ‘2’ much

My British fiancé, Richard, came with a dowry. Lest anyone think I married money, china and sterling-for-eight, let me set you straight: Richard’s dowry was a huge, wooden salad bowl, a carpet sweeper and a stool. My dowry had the china, sterling and a vacuum cleaner.   No stools were made for Charles III’s coronation, although many chairs have been for important guests. What a shame The salad bowl was significant to our courtship as it held the grand salads that Richard indulged in on his terrace in Grandvaux, a tiny village, above Lutry on Lac Léman. When our courting became significant, Richard wooed me with his salads – heaps

There is something very equalising about a street party. At one gathering I attended last year on a central London mews, a trust fund baby peered nervously out from his living room window before deciding to emerge, carrying two bottles of champagne and a flower vase filled with a tumultuous mess of a Platinum Jubilee trifle. When the lemonade for the Pimm’s ran out, the champagne was mixed in instead. He didn’t seem to mind. It’s good for us British to be thrust into these social settings. I get the impression that some of the Mediterranean peoples do this sort of thing every weekend: long balmy evenings help I suppose.