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Recently, Antonia Hoyle wrote about this autumn’s influx of wasps, flies, mice and spiders into her home. In response, Spectator readers have been offering their tricks and tips for getting rid of household pests… ‘Grow pots of lavender everywhere; hang up dried sheaves, put it in vases. Grow it in pots outside and under windows. You don’t see flies around lavender. Grow basil, mint and rosemary. I put sprigs of rosemary in wardrobes, suitcases when travelling, in bath water and in clothes drawers. Spiders are meant not to like basil in particular so tear up leaves and sprinkle in prime areas. Leave dried basil leaves on windowsills where you don’t grow

Off to my old manor, the Globe theatre, to join a celebratory gathering of thems and theys for I, Joan, a non-binary telling of the Joan of Arc story. The show has caused no shortage of outrage in various communities on the left, centre and right, and has had the Globe labelled as misogynist by feminists of a certain generation. It is a great compliment to the Globe that even though it only opened in 1997, it is already held so dear that whatever happens there is quickly amplified into a broader debate. In my time as artistic director, we had one Sun front page ridiculing our engagement with foreigners;

At its peak, Battersea Power Station supplied a fifth of London’s electricity, including to Buckingham Palace and parliament. Today, the most electric thing about it is the virtual reality gaming venue on site. Times have changed – but the reopening of the power station allows us to rediscover one of our finest pieces of industrial heritage and to take stock of the neighbourhood’s £9 billion makeover. The iconic Grade II*-listed building was decommissioned and shut down in 1983. Over the past ten years, in Europe’s largest urban regeneration project, it has been restored and repurposed. The project reaches its climax today when the power station reopens as a residential, retail

‘Golden’ is often used to describe the hue of some wines in the glass. But there is another resemblance. Gold is a beautiful metal as well as a store of value. Wine, covetable for its taste, can also be a store of value, at least for many years. So it inevitably attracts the attention of investors, the best of whom want to deploy expertise partly in order to finance their drinking. The late Roger Scruton, no less, once wrote a piece explaining how it was possible to drink Château Lafite free. You estimate your future needs and then buy twice the quantity. Within a few years, you should be able

It has been almost a decade since the first apartments at Battersea Power Station went on sale. Such was the excitement about its redevelopment that buyers queued in the chilly dawn for the chance to pick up a £343,000 studio flat or a £6 million penthouse. Most were from overseas, and in four days in January 2013 they collectively spent £600 million. These kinds of scenes are something London’s housebuilders and estate agents can today only dream of. Although we have moved on from worst ravages of the pandemic, and traveller numbers are very much in recovery, many foreign property buyers – for years the mainstay of prime London’s property

I have a deep-seated hatred of the hospitality QR code. It ripped through the industry as part of questionable social-distancing initiatives during the pandemic, taking the place of menus and human interaction – and has stubbornly refused to disappear, making my heart sink when I find one sellotaped to the table of a bar or restaurant. However, there’s one hospitality QR code that I found myself developing a fondness for – the one that comes with Pret a Manger’s coffee subscription. Launched in September 2020, the scheme is a financial godsend for coffee addicts. For £25 a month, subscribers can order up to five ‘barista-made’ drinks per day (coffees, teas,

Mark Millar, creator of series including Netflix’s forthcoming American Jesus, has a theory that movie and TV fashions work in 11-year cycles and that we’re just starting a new one now. If he’s right – and I think he is – then it would explain a lot about the second-most disappointing series currently on TV, House of the Dragon. Up till now, I have been giving huge quantities of benefit-of-the-doubt to House of the Dragon. But having endured episode six, I think my patience is finally exhausted. Any TV episode that begins with a protracted and graphic childbirth scene is going to sorely challenge the interest of at least half

A global pandemic, a booming stock market giving way to painful economic shock, a technological revolution… there are many parallels to be drawn between the 1920s and the 2020s. But if you look very closely, you might find there is another thread linking the two eras: the rise of the speakeasy. These clandestine drinking holes rose to prominence during America’s Prohibition era (1920-33). Following the hardships of the first world war, speakeasies provided a sense of raucous escapism – where jazz music boomed and genders and races mixed freely. The same search for escapism (and nostalgia) is what draws drinkers to them today, says Marco Matesi, bar manager of Downstairs at The Dilly, one

Make no mistake: the game of rugby, which many of us love so much, is in serious trouble: it will have to change or die. The game’s scarily existential issue on the field – especially the brain health of those who play it – is one thing. But what is going on inside the heads of those who run the sport? The financial clouds hovering over English rugby are as menacing as Billy Vunipola coming on to the ball at full speed from the back of the scrum. Worcester Warriors are just the start: Wasps are in trouble, and Bristol could be next. There will be more. Only Leicester, Northampton