When I said “they” are coming to dinner, there’s only one of them
‘When I said “they” are coming to dinner, there’s only one of them.’
Uncategorized
Wednesday
Go to sleep
‘Go to sleep or the left-wing economic establishment will get you.’
Why why why
Enough is enough
Cartoonists strike.
Please gambol responsibly
‘Please gambol responsibly.’
You can’t afford money any more
‘I’m afraid you can’t afford money any more.’
Robust working practices
‘Stop employing robust working practices.’
You know how nosy our neighbour is
‘You know how nosy our neighbour is.’
There’s no going back
Can the Ineos Grenadier rival the Land Rover?
When Land Rover finally axed its ‘old’ Defender in 2016 and promised to replace it with something better, traditionalists shed tears as readily as their beloved old-school Landys dripped oil. And the arrival of the ‘new’ Defender in early 2020 did nothing to help: ‘too expensive’, said some; ‘too complicated’, said others. ‘Too precious’, they moaned. ‘Not a real Defender’, they concluded. Oddly, it seemed, such people really did want to carry on driving a car based on a 70-year-old design that was bereft of safety features, as aerodynamic as a breeze block, as draughty as a shed, rusted readily underneath and with the turning circle of a tanker. But
The etiquette of field sex
Field sex is, I believe, an experience that unites those from all walks of life. Whether it was a drunken fumble, a discreet teenage quickie hidden from your parents or a planned act to inject some spice into your waning marriage, plenty of us have felt the vulnerability of walking to the car with a muddy back, anxiously wondering if we’d been spotted by a dog walker. Admittedly, field sex etiquette isn’t something that I’ve put much thought into. But after Prince Harry’s older woman (two years older to be exact) laid bare her five-minute rendezvous with the adolescent royal, it got me thinking about the right way to do it. The
The secrets of London by postcode: SE (South East)
Our tour of the trivia behind London’s postcode areas has reached SE, where we find rock stars being embalmed, P.G. Wodehouse reporting on cricket and Westminster Bridge being painted green for a very specific reason. Oh, and Winston Churchill gets a hat-trick of mentions…
Tuesday
How the bottom fell out of the prime country market (again)
As trophy homes go, the Grade II*-listed Glen Usk is hard to top. Set on the west bank of the River Usk in Wales, it is a white rendered neoclassical fairy-tale of a Georgian country house and its current owners have thoroughly renovated the eight-bedroom home, set in 35 acres. At the tail end of 2021 it went on the market with estate agent Fine & Country for £6.5 million. In November the Monmouthshire property’s price was dropped by £2 million after failing to find a buyer (and also to reflect a decision to reduce the amount of land to be sold with it from 75 acres to 35). Three months later,
The joy of non-league football
On a cold Tuesday night, as the wind whipped in from the North Sea, I joined 220 hardy souls to watch a game of football. Less than a mile away from the Sizewell nuclear plant on the Suffolk coast but light years away from the lurid lights of the Premiership, Leiston FC were playing Ilkeston Town in the Pitching In Southern League – Premier Division Central. As the old joke goes, the attendance was so small it would have been easier to name the crowd changes than the team changes. Welcome to non-league football – in this case the seventh tier of the game’s pyramid system of promotion and relegation.
The toxic women of gym TikTok
The hashtag ‘gym creep’ now has more than 37.3 million views on TikTok. Honestly, I’ve watched hundreds of these videos and the only weird behaviour I can spot in any of the clips is from the women recording the unsuspecting men while they work out. ‘Watch this creep,’ the lady will say as a confused male just happens to glance at the camera that’s been shoved in front of him. Scandalous! Gina Love is one of these women. The TikTokker, whose feed mainly consists of her trying on different shades of lipgloss, went viral after posting a video of her doing deadlifts, supposedly catching out one of these so-called #gymcreeps. ‘Watch this
Monday
Sturgeon’s tax stunt backfires
The Tories have been left counting the cost of Nadhim Zahawi for some weeks now. The tax affairs of the axed party chairman have triggered a whole debate around sleaze, standards and transparency. Rishi Sunak is now expected to publish his own tax returns within weeks; polling for The Spectator by Redfield and Wilton shows that a whopping 70 per cent of Britons believe that ministers should do the same – including two-thirds of 2019 Tory voters. Only 17 per cent of the public now think those in government should be allowed to keep their personal returns private. Leading the charge on all this is Nicola Sturgeon. The First Minister
How King Charles saved Cornwall
I’m a 30th generation Cornishman. I’m so Cornish my mum can make Cornish pasties blindfolded, my maternal grandmother was employed aged nine to break rocks in a Cornish tin mine (she was a ‘bal maiden’), and my second cousins founded Cornish Solidarity, which is the very-lightly-armed wing of Mebyon Kernow (the Cornish Plaid Cymru). Nonetheless my visits to the county are infrequent, probably because I am not overly fond of rain. However, on my most recent visit I noticed that something in Cornwall has changed. Perhaps I noticed it because I only go down to the see the folks once or twice a year, so I am made suddenly aware
Madonna and the curious business of biopics
Reading that Madonna has decided to cancel the film about her life that she has been working on for the past two years, I felt a pang of sorrow. The biopic sounded like the biggest vanity project ever attempted – and thus promised to be an excellent ‘mock-watch’, as I’ve named the cinematic equivalent of the ‘hate-read’. In the specific case of biopics (always an easy thing to get wrong when one person imitates another, often with hilarious results), perhaps ‘sham-shaming’ is even better. Madonna was reported to be directing, producing and co-writing the film with the Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody, who has since moved on to the live-action Powerpuff
Will child-free flights take off?
At first glance, I wasn’t sure if an email I got recently about ‘adults-only flights’ was a joke. I’m a parent of two teenage boys who has observed with dismay the growing intolerance for children in the public square in recent years. But I’d never heard anything like this. So I reviewed the study of 1,000 adults conducted by PhotoAID, and while I don’t know how scientific it was given that it was carried out by a company that sells passport and visa photos, the results are striking. Eight in ten survey respondents said they want adult-only flights, and 64 per cent said they’re willing to pay a premium of 10 to
Sunday
Britain’s remarkable fight to end the slave trade
On 20 June 1897 around 2,000 people paraded outside the colonial Government house in the Seychelles. Like many throughout the British Empire, they were celebrating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The crowd held large Union Jacks printed with the words, ‘The Flag that sets us free.’ All had been rescued by the Royal Navy from the East African Slave Trade. Once gathered, a message translated from Créole was given to the colonial administrator, Cockburn-Stewart. The message said: ‘We members of the different tribes of Africans living in the Seychelles, take the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria to express to you – Her Representative in these Islands our thanks for
