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I own a motorcycle riding jacket that is unabashedly a fashion piece. It contains armour made of a space-age material that hardens on impact but that is hidden away. The outside is constructed of ‘pull up leather’ which was tanned in such a way that the jet-black colour artificially fades in places that see a lot of motion, like the cuffs. With its quilted shoulders and sharp angles, the jacket suggests a history of ownership dating back to the café racers of the 1960s, despite only being five years old. Although it looks cool as hell and helps keep me safe, I always feel a bit sheepish wearing the thing.

There on my television screen, in a somewhat surreal sequence, was Boris Johnson contemplating the women in his life. And suddenly before me appeared the famous Wyatt features: first eyes, then a nose and then a mouth, right into camera. Medium-range shot and then a close-up. Ah, we had faces then. And then I looked harder, and my blood turned to Freon. It was just a large photograph of me stuck on a 10ft projector screen. Couldn’t those cheapskates at Sky have got a goddamn actress instead of a Polaroid?  As it turns out, This England, the Kenneth Branagh series about my old friend Boris, is more Psycho than psychodrama. Someone

In a wide clearing in woodland in a county of southern England that shall remain unnamed, a very unusual property is being built from brick and wood. When complete in a couple of years’ time, a lost rambler who stumbles across it may think he has found an old country house dating from the early 18th century, perhaps even the late 17th. With its classical proportions and time-honoured elegance, the building could be mistaken for an unadvertised outpost of the National Trust, the ancestral home of minor gentry, or even the setting for Bridgerton or some other regency drama. Yet this will be a thoroughly modern home, albeit one that embraces certain

The good news – apparently; I haven’t seen it yet so this may just be a false rumour – is that House of the Dragon episode 6 is really exciting, full of incident and drama and intriguing, well-drawn characters. But the bad news, as I can personally testify, is that in order to reach that point you have to wade through five whole hours’ worth of ball-breaking tedium. Admittedly, even the original Game of Thrones used to do this a bit on occasion: episode after episode of characters talking to apparently little purpose, then suddenly the Red Wedding. But the difference was, you never doubted that the story was going

Food waste is suddenly the subject on everyone’s lips. A combination of environmental concern and biting inflation has propelled an issue that was already rising up the public consciousness on to centre stage. Some supermarkets are dropping ‘best before’ labels on fresh produce, and this month the British Frozen Food Federation launched a campaign to highlight the virtues of freezing to save money. The issue even gained a mention in the first televised debate of the Tory leadership contest at the end of July, when Liz Truss stated: ‘I am naturally a thrifty person. I like saving money and it also helps the environment. It’s about using less, wasting less, particularly food

It’s a well-known fact that Michael Palin is a ‘national treasure’. Or so you are told just about every single time the travel presenter and writer appears on television or features in a newspaper interview. So it was with grim inevitably that a few days before the first instalment of his latest expedition, Michael Palin: Into Iraq, aired on Channel 5 on Tuesday, the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times both felt it imperative to describe him with this phrase. Never mind that he’s no doubt utterly sick of this lazy cliché – objectively, it’s a misleading misnomer. ‘National treasure’ is patronising, twee and demeaning, and distracts from the fact that

Don’t bother watching those gazillion-dollar TV prequels to The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. Who needs gratuitous nudity, multiple dragons and surprise beheadings when the real Nordic legend is bang in front of us, his mighty frame squeezed into the light blue of Manchester City and devouring the grass of the Etihad? (Though not literally, yet.) He is an outlandish–looking creature from the far north, clearly designed by some dotty scientist, faster, bigger, stronger and more ruthless than anyone else in football and effortlessly leaping higher too. Quick to smile, often at awkward moments, he moves effortlessly with that curious stiff-armed gait as he outruns everyone else

Posing as a marine biologist and with Soviet agent Anya Amasova posing as his wife, James Bond checked into Hotel Cala di Volpe in the The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). Their mission: to gather intelligence aboard super-villain Karl Stromberg’s secret underwater lair, somewhere in the Tyrrhenian Sea between Sardinia and the Italian mainland. In the meantime, they stay in a spacious suite with exposed wooden beams and open ocean views (where Amasova also vows to kill Bond when the mission is over). When I stayed at Cala di Volpe this year, I saw no villainous marine lair, just Tommy Hilfiger’s super yacht. The hotel has retained its Bond glamour through