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Another day, another warning about the perils of alcohol from a body that should know better. The World Health Organisation, which just a few years ago was prescribing solitary confinement as the cure for our ills, has recently announced the preferred level we should be drinking every day: zero, zip, nada – not a drop. Last week a Professor Nutt – nominative determinism in action if ever I saw it – was a little more generous. He suggested we would be safe with ‘one glass a year’. He was joined last weekend by a dreary columnist in the Financial Times, who said he took up drinking at 30 but wishes

A smartly dressed, bowler-hatted man and a lady in a fascinator – both of whom would hardly look out of place at Royal Ascot – stride into the pigsty with clipboards, while a white-coated man (looking a little too much like a butcher) seeks the views of a small crowd of adults and children on the qualities of four physically impressive swine. This is the delightful eccentricity of the English county show – part agricultural competition, part funfair, part entertainment, part craft fair, part trade show, part society occasion, and part food and drink extravaganza – that provides an unrivalled insight into the complexity of modern Britain’s rural economy and

Nothing in life prepares you for the school run. In theory, on paper, it ought to be idyllic. What could be better than feeding a nutritious breakfast to your nine- and five-year-old, before scrubbing their cherubic upturned faces and combing down their buoyant hair, and then helping them get dressed and out to the car for the short drive to school, whereupon they can skip through the gates happily to education-land? Instead, it’s a Thursday morning – by which point the week has taken its toll – and you find yourself shouting ‘GET YOUR SHOES ON’ for the 30th time at the sort of level that would be a serious

The illustration shows a smiling couple on a yacht, the wind ruffling their hair and the coastline receding into the distance behind them. Above it are the words: ‘Work out of London – get more out of life.’ Something from the post-Covid work-from-home era, perhaps, or Boris Johnson’s 2019 ‘levelling up’ election campaign? No – this is the work of ‘The Location of Offices Bureau’, set up by the Tory government in 1963 and abolished by Margaret Thatcher. The advert appears on the wall of a decommissioned Tube carriage that’s one of many frozen in time in a warehouse in west London. In the latest issue of The Spectator, Richard

A spell has been cast. Three children – Dominic McLaughlin, Alastair Stout and Arabella Stanton – have magically gone from obscurity to global fame, after HBO announced that they will be playing Harry, Ron and Hermione in the new Harry Potter series. HBO released a photograph of the trio, kneeling in the grass looking earnest, expectant, enthusiastic – and very, very, young. My first thought? Good luck to them, they’re going to need it. The fact that HBO felt the need to immediately disable the comments underneath its Instagram post shows the scale of pre-emptive scrutiny the project is under. The series itself is a huge risk, and with many wondering how

As someone who flies a lot for work, many of my moments of high blood pressure or ‘Is this really what I want in life?’ introspection take place in airports or on aeroplanes. I cannot – to put it gently – relate to the moronic practitioners of the ‘airport theory’, which involves turning up deliberately late for flights to get an adrenaline rush, and/or to make a sorry living off social media views. No, I’m there in good time, so it shouldn’t be a particularly stressful experience. And yet I’ve come to rather despise flying. It wasn’t always this way. Admittedly my relationship with flying got off to a slightly