Uncategorized

Do you have a favourite petrol station? I do. It’s a scruffy little place in East Bergholt in the wilds of north Essex. It has two elderly-looking pumps that I think have padlocks on them when no one is around. I’ve never managed to buy fuel from them, but I’m determined to before it’s too late. Where it takes about two minutes to fill up a car with petrol or diesel, even the fastest electric car chargers take 30 minutes Because with the headlong rush to buy electric cars (or EVs as they’re so romantically known) fast coming, the humble British petrol station seems under threat. Whether or not Rishi

Tis the season to eat salads and wear skimpy clothes. At least, that’s what we’re led to believe, egged on by adverts featuring bikini-clad models, barely-there fashion in shops, television series such as Love Island that equate sunshine with slender figures and the perennial expectation that we should by now be ‘beach body ready’. We’re undoubtedly more sociable in summer. A study last year found that we’re twice as likely to make excuses to avoid a social event in the winter Yet quite aside from the idiocy of only being ‘allowed’ to enjoy the warm weather when we’re deemed aesthetically agreeable enough by unidentified authorities, summer isn’t ever when we are

Some of the ways the rich can amuse and refresh themselves today include spas in the Maldives with glass floors offering views of brightly coloured fish during treatment, private retreats in the mountains of St Lucia costing thousands per night, and fabulous overnight trains through Rajasthan. But the last word in luxury is still to be found in the heartlands of European civilisation – France – and it almost always involves the creative, bordering on unbelievable co-option of heritage, only possible through the most fabulous contacts, patience and expense.  So after a year of trying, I finally found myself sleeping on the grounds of the chateau of Versailles, in the