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As Britain toasted seven decades of the Queen’s reign outside Buckingham Palace, the Welsh basked in their 1600-year survival. Dafydd Iwan, the republican nationalist folk singer, bellowed Yma O Hyd around the Cardiff City Stadium as Wales took on Ukraine in their World Cup qualifier. A simple title – We’re Still Here – makes you want to weep and, then, fight.  What was once a marginal protest tune, composed at the height of Thatcherism after Wales rejected devolution in 1979, is now an apt anthem for spurring on Welsh footballers. Until recent years they were not a celebrated or well-known species but Gareth Bale, Aaron Ramsey and Joe Allen have changed all

When the University of Cambridge’s vice-chancellor Stephen Toope told the Times that students’ gap year projects abroad can build less resilience than the everyday lives of students from modest backgrounds, he was of course right. In today’s culture, the three months I spent attempting to teach English in southern Malawi in the late Noughties now feel like a dirty secret of over-privilege; something that’s deserving of the same discretion as having a childhood pony or the fact that you spent the Easter holidays in the Alps. Actor Matt Lacey’s three-minute You Tube sketch ‘Gap Yah’, that went viral in 2010, cemented the cliché: the pashmina-clad Orlando braying about chundering his way

The debate about Swedish hospitality started on Reddit – a forum otherwise known for such profound discussions as ‘Can you watch porn on a hotel’s wifi?’ – and has now gone global. Even the New York Times has weighed in with an article entitled: ‘Do Swedish People Feed Their Guests?’  The whole fuss is difficult to comprehend from a Swedish point of view Suddenly, it seems, the world is talking about Sweden’s lack of domestic warmth. Here in Stockholm, the buzz was first brushed off as a joke. When the subject started trending on Twitter, it was in all seriousness thought to be the potential work of Russian troll factories;

The French epicure Jean-Anthelm Brillat-Savarin, writing in the early decades of the nineteenth century, remarked, ‘Read the historians, from Herodotus down to our own day, and you will see that there has never been a great event, not even excepting conspiracies, which was not conceived, worked out, and organized over a meal.’ And indeed it is true that State Banquets are amongst the most important opportunities for discussion and diplomacy. Her Majesty The Queen has over the past 70 years received well over 100 inward State Visits. She has undertaken over 260 official visits overseas including nearly 100 outward State Visits, making her the most travelled monarch in history. As

Royal tours in glorious destinations might look like fun but they are technically classed as work. So where do the Royal Family choose to go to get their fix of sunshine and rest? Balmoral and Sandringham have always been favoured by the Queen but there are also several overseas spots that have become firm royal favourites. Malta Between 1949 and 1951 Princess Elizabeth, as she was then, and Philip lived in Malta in a small town called Pieta very near the Maltese capital of Valletta. Their home was the Villa Guardamangia, an eighteenth-century ‘garden palace’ loaned to Philip by his uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten while Philip was stationed in Malta

When a French friend invited me to the local shooting range here in my canton in the south of France, I was simultaneously intrigued and a little horrified, in a reticent British way. Guns are not really respectable in England. The carnage wrought by firearms in America would seem to make anyone advocating the right to own them something of a pariah. The French have a different attitude. Guns are legal to own here. Not just shotguns for hunting and clay pigeon shooting. But semi-automatic rifles including assault-type long guns and more or less any kind of handgun, except for the ones that fire armour-penetrating bullets. Here’s what I discovered

Sunday mornings in the Hampshire countryside remind me of a medieval pageant. While marketeers open their stalls and labradors bark, you see hundreds of jousters in gaudy livery steering their two-wheeled chargers along the lanes, trying not to get knocked off. But while everyone loves a knight, everyone hates a cyclist. Reader, I must confess: I myself am a member of the brotherhood of Lycra. I don’t shave my legs, I hasten to add. Though the fact that I’ve just written that shows how seriously my tribe takes their pursuit. Since taking up cycling in 2019, I have ridden thousands of miles and competed in several amateur races. The sense of

Without ‘drastic government action’ a recent report has warned, obese adults in the UK are set to outnumber those who are a healthy weight within five years. By 2040 nearly four in ten adults in the UK, that’s 21 million people, are projected to be obese, with 19 million classed as overweight. The so-called obesity crisis is costing NHS England more than £6 billion a year while according to a recent World Health Organisation report, within ten years Britain is set to become the fattest nation in Europe, overtaking both Turkey and Malta. Keen not to be seen to be too nannyish but knowing he has to do something if