Uncategorized

Monday

Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

The BBC’s Blue Lights is a near-perfect cop drama

‘Remember your training Grace, get the rifle.’ We’re only moments into the opening episode of the superb new police procedural Blue Lights when we are reminded this is a very different cop show. In Northern Ireland, where it is set, policing the semi-skimmed peace still carries the additional risk of being ambushed by terrorists. Being tooled up, even for a traffic stop, can be a matter of life and death.   Any of us who have worn a uniform while wet behind the ears can empathise with the struggle of these three new officers Grace and Stevie, her mentor – and possibly more as the series develops – are two central characters in

Victoria Lane

Why Madeira is like Swiss cheese

Three days on Madeira can feel like a week – not because time ­­drags, but because the place is so varied with its many different weathers. From the aeroplane you could be circling over the Caribbean, an impression given by the lush scrambling vegetation and orange rooftops jostling up the mountains. We landed at Cristiano Ronaldo airport, named for the most famous living Madeiran. Having surveyed the situation from the air, I wondered how he found anywhere flat enough for football. We kicked off with a puncha – Madeira’s ubiquitous rum punch, sweetened with orange and honey. It was our duty and pleasure to try it We headed first for

Saturday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

There’s nothing wrong with leaving a sick partner

Danielle Epstein’s story is a sad one; last year she was in the process of buying a house with her boyfriend when he was diagnosed with a brain tumour, underwent a serious operation and had to learn to walk again. He wasn’t the only one who walked; Miss Epstein did also, and not just down the road where she could keep an eye on him, but all the way to sunny Thailand. She said in her defence: ‘I felt like the most awful person, leaving somebody because they have cancer, but it was damaging my mental health and it wasn’t helping him… I couldn’t sleep or eat, I was having

Michael Simmons Michael Simmons

How useful is a Twitter blue tick?

Alex Salmond was one of the first to fall victim to Twitter’s blue tick cull. An account with the same name as his began sending out disparaging tweets about his sub-optimal bowel movements. The account was tweeting shortly after Elon Musk removed 400,000 ‘legacy verified’ blue ticks, little badges that sit next to a user’s name, which were originally designed to stop impersonation. Musk’s removal of the verified ticks – previously given to celebs, politicians and journalists to prove they are who they said they are – makes way for a free market approach to verification. Any tweeter can now pay £9.60 a month for the blue tick (provided their

Friday

Penworthy

Two tips for the Scottish Grand National

Scottish trainer Lucinda Russell has her string in such fine form that she might win a race at Ayr this weekend if she entered the stable cat. From her five runners at Aintree last weekend, she ended up with two wins, two seconds and a sixth – quite an achievement. Pride of place went, of course, to Corach Rambler who landed the Randox Grand National. No tipster rightly gets many plaudits for putting up the favourite in a big race but I am pleased to say that loyal Spectator Life readers were put on him before Christmas – three and a half months before the race – at 20-1. At

Sean Thomas

AI and the end of immigration

There are many things to be learnt from visiting an airport. A trip to Stansted Airport, for instance, will teach you that Stansted is a really dim place to locate an airport. Meanwhile, JFK in New York City will inform you that America is becoming seriously pricey for European tourists. But a recent trip to Bangkok airport taught me something more profound. There I was, supping some pleasant Singapore Laksa, and I saw this thing hove into view. It was an autonomous robot cleaner, busily keeping all the shiny floors of Suvarnabhumi airport in pristine condition. Instead of desperately needing more workers to make up for low birth rates and

Alex Barton

In defence of the hash brown

The English Breakfast Society has cancelled the hash brown, calling it a ‘lazy American replacement to bubble and squeak’. Guise Bule de Missenden, the society’s founder (sounds European to me), warned that giving hash browns the stamp of approval would only encourage the adoption of other ‘unsuitable fillers like chips’, or worse ‘fish fingers’ and ‘kebab meat’. (Seriously Guise, unless you are an infant or a drunk, the latter two are not part of any normal diet.) The boffins at the English Breakfast Society need to get with the times ‘Someone has to draw the line and say no to hash browns,’ he said. ‘They are served by those who lack pride in the full

Wednesday

Gus Carter Gus Carter

Why I’ve fallen out of love with my Brompton

In the darkest depths of lockdown, trapped in a subterranean flat in South London, I struck upon an idea: I would buy a bike. I’d had one at university and remembered enjoying the meditative effects of gliding through parks and down streets. It would mean something to do other than fighting over who got to work at the kitchen table or staring mutely at our little telly.  I met the seller in a multi-storey car park in Woolwich. He popped his trunk, revealing a jumble of metal tubing and cables about the size of a suitcase: a foldable Brompton bicycle. As he lugged it onto the concrete floor, Taut explained

James Jeffrey

I miss the Cold War

Berliner Luft is a popular peppermint-flavoured shot downed in the city’s bars. It also means Berlin Air and is a colloquialism for the city’s spirit of unfettered freedom and rebellious abandon. Given what this city went through, reduced to rubble by the furious Russians at the end of world war two, and then rent in two for more than 40 years during the Cold War, it’s not surprising that after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the populace needed to let off steam. As friends who grew up in army families have also noted, it’s sobering to reflect that the way of life enjoyed by our parents’ generation now