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It’s harder than ever to get away from it all in the Cotswolds. Come Friday night, west Londoners pack their bags and descend on the countryside. Many ‘up from Londoners’ head to places such as Soho Farmhouse. The success of Clarkson’s Farm, a hit TV show based at the former Top Gear presenter’s Cotswolds patch, has only added to the chaos. The Cotswolds’ blessing – its proximity to the capital – has become its curse. Trudging around the area’s beautiful towns and village isn’t what it once was. Fortunately, though, there is a way to escape the hordes and still enjoy the Cotswolds. You could do worse than follow a

Picture the scene: it’s 8 p.m. on a Tuesday. You’re sitting on the sofa in the home of someone you barely know, gulping supermarket wine, making inane chitchat with friends of friends as you all put off the inevitable: discussing a book only a third of the women – always women – in the room have actually bothered to read. In your head, you’re counting the minutes until you can excuse yourself for the last train home, wondering what’s happening on tonight’s Bake Off and engineering a strategy to quietly remove yourself from the group WhatsApp without appearing rude. You stifle a yawn and subtly check your watch while necking

In his first interview since being reappointed, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly laid down some clear diplomatic water between his party and Labour – confirming that, unlike Keir Starmer, he would attend this winter’s Qatar World Cup. The Foreign Secretary won’t be alone. The Football Association expects that some 10,000 England fans will make the journey to a World Cup widely regarded as the most controversial in history (though Prince William, the FA’s president, will reportedly not be among them). So what awaits them when they get there? If the headlines so far are anything to go by, they could be in for a rude awakening. From sky-high prices for a

Ziplining and beekeeping may not be your typical city break activities – but then again, Ottawa is not your typical city. Sandwiched between the more sought-after Toronto and Montreal, it’s also not typically at the top of travellers’ wish-lists. When I started planning my visit, the question I kept being asked was ‘why go there?’. But by the time I came back, I was asking ‘why don’t more people go there?’. With its history, architecture, museums, river walks and cycle paths, Ottawa offers the best bits of both a city break and countryside retreat. The Canadian capital is best described as a rural metropolis – imagine picking up the City

Since the pandemic, the UK’s dog population has boomed to more than 12 million, with a third of households owning one. But while once we might have been content to kit them out with their own kennel, now it seems they’re dictating what sort of home we want for ourselves.  Buyers are increasingly seeking out properties with high-end creature comforts such as built-in dog showers or dog beds integrated into kitchen units. Clare Coode of Stacks Property Search says: ‘Thirty per cent of my clients mention their dogs in our first conversation. Their priorities are dog walks from the door, a dedicated dog room with external access or having a section of

A few days ago, when everything looked black, a small group of us were consoling ourselves over a couple of good bottles. ‘In politics,’ said I, ‘things are never as bad as you fear, or as good as you hope.’ ‘I entirely agree,’ replied one friend. ‘At the moment, things are not as bad as I fear. They are worse.’ That was before Bojo lost his mojo. Has his curse now finally been lifted from the Conservative party? It would be foolish to offer a swift and complacent ‘yes’. Among the political figures Boris resembles, we must include not only Alcibiades, Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump. There is also Rasputin.

It seems our course is set. Food prices are rising at the fastest rate in more than 40 years, taking the average family’s yearly grocery bill over £5,200 – and there’s no relief in sight. Lord Woolton would be rubbing his hands at a situation so ripe for his ingenuity and optimism – and perhaps his namesake pie and the national loaf might find themselves resuscitated before long. But his 1945 call for ‘a simpler diet’ of bread, potatoes and vegetable oils won’t help much in 2022. According to the Office for National Statistics, ‘low-cost’ everyday staples are seeing the greatest price rises of all, with the average cost increasing by 17 per

The British middle-classes are a predictable breed. We love nothing more than to take goods that were once prudent and pragmatic and give them a luxury edge. From the Mini Cooper, first marketed as an affordable car for the masses, to Land Rover Defenders that we have no intention of spoiling with mud, we like our creature comforts to be rooted in a make-do-and-mend mindset, even if they have long outgrown their original purpose. It’s little wonder, then, that the British have been so quick to embrace wood-burners. Because what embodies that no-nonsense, post-war mentality better than huddling around the hearth to keep warm or stacking logs into a shed

The fifth series of Netflix’s The Crown will soon be upon us. Scripted, as ever, by Peter Morgan, the show will cover the travails of the royal family throughout the 1990s, spanning everything from the then Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s marital difficulties and eventual divorce to the rumours of Prince Philip conducting an affair with a much younger woman (his partner in carriage driving, we are told). Jonny Lee Miller, erstwhile Sick Boy from Trainspotting and Sherlock Holmes from Elementary, dons thick glasses and a grey wig to play former prime minister John Major, a decent man who never stood a chance. Later in the series, we are promised the first