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Friday

Marianna Hunt

Britain’s best boltholes for under £50 a night

Whether it’s train fares, energy bills or the supermarket shop, prices are rising and belts are tightening. But if you’re desperate to get away from it all, it’s still possible to have a break on a budget – however many people you’re taking with you. From cosy couples’ cabins to beach houses big enough for two families, and from Scotland to Sussex, these seven boltholes offer spring getaways with plenty of wow factor – and all cost no more than £50 per person per night. For couples  Tahuna Bothies, Aberdeenshire Sleeps: 2-4Price: From £100 a night (£50 each for two people)  These wooden huts on a corner of Scottish coast

Adam Hay-Nicholls

Ghost story: the dark side of Rolls-Royce

Some years ago, I was despatched to Las Vegas to learn how to be a chauffeur. The Wynn hotel had purchased a fleet of Rolls-Royces, and their Aloysius Parkers were being taught how to drive the Rolls-Royce way – i.e. a cut above your Lincoln Town Car etiquette. ‘The umbrella can be used both defensively and offensively,’ I recall Rolls-Royce’s Andi McCann saying, as if he’d walked off the set of Kingsman. Andi is the personal driver to Rolls’s CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös and the company’s lead trainer. I learned many things on his white-glove course, starting with how umbrellas, housed inside each door, can be used to protect from paparazzi

Wednesday

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Nicola Sturgeon and the truth about motorhomes

Watching the narrative arc of the Sturgeon family campervan – removed from the drive of Nicola Sturgeon’s mother-in-law as part of an SNP fraud probe – is an opportunity to review the campervan. Or motorhome, if you prefer. The Mrs Murrell model is a stylish Niesmann + Bischoff ‘iSmove’, priced at £110,000 or thereabouts (her son, Peter Murrell, it should be said, has been released without charge pending further investigation). There’s an irony in being accused of embezzling money for an independence campaign and then supposedly spending it on driving away. Nationalism is about standing still, but campervans contain people and people contain multitudes. There is a cognitive dissonance between

Liz Rowlinson

How padel courts became hot property

Peloton has peaked and troughed, wild swimming has made its splash – and now, it seems, it’s padel’s turn for the prime spot. Said to be the world’s fastest-growing racket sport, the game – a hybrid of tennis and squash, with a dash of ping pong – is fun and sociable (it’s played in doubles) and has been adopted by around 25 million people worldwide. Easy to get good at quite quickly, it’s also apparently the ‘new golf’ among retired footballers – David Beckham is a fan.  ‘Padel has become an obsession in the shires… a padel court is the latest must-have in country houses’ Across the UK, any sports