Uncategorized

Sunday

Flora Watkins

Why the middle classes are giving up on skiing

Let’s cherchez un violon petit! Skiing is now too pricey for the middle classes. According to a recent flash poll by the Telegraph’s ski section, 70 per cent of readers now think skiing holidays are unaffordable. For the bourgeoisie, skiing – along with many of the other trappings they used to take for granted, such as being able to afford the fees for a private day school or a daily takeaway coffee – ce n’est pas possible. Quel dommage! (Let’s parlez anglais now; I think you get the point.) It’s not just the accelerated cost of living in the UK – or Liz Truss personally putting our mortgages up by

Saturday

Raquel Rosario Sánchez

Farewell to Pope Francis

Today, millions of people will watch the funeral of Pope Francis taking place at the Vatican. The ceremony, expected to be attended by thousands of people and world leaders including Prime Minister Keir Starmer and United States president Donald Trump, will take place outdoors, in front of the Saint Peter’s Basilica. Afterwards, the Pope’s remains will be buried in the Basilica of Saint Mary Major where he will have a simple burial, as per his wishes set out in his testament: “The tomb should be in the ground; simple, without particular ornamentation, bearing only the inscription: Franciscus.” These are the final wishes of a modest man who, despite his apparent

Zak Asgard

Are you a high agency individual?

Hello and welcome to my podcast Are you a high agency individual? My name is Muscle McSteroid Face, but my friends call me the Beast for short. Please enjoy the next 135 minutes while I talk about myself and make you feel inadequate. I am a high agency individual. I was born this way, but you can learn my skills for an introductory offer of $59.99 a month (link in my bio). A high agency person is a risk taker. We are mavericks. We are the writers of our own destiny, the authors of our own story. We are leaders. We make tough decisions. If you were stuck in a

Friday

Penworthy

Four bets for Sandown tomorrow

The Dan Skelton versus Willie Mullins battle reaches its finale at Sandown tomorrow when one of these two brilliant trainers will be crowned Britain’s champion National Hunt trainer for the 2024-5 season. Skelton, who trains in Warwickshire, goes into the final two days of the season with a narrow lead over Mullins, who trains from his all-conquering Irish yard in Co. Carlow. However, with all the firepower at his disposal, it looks highly likely that Mullins will overtake Skelton’s prize money total tomorrow, given the latter’s lead is less than £60,000. For example, Mullins fields no less than ten runners in the bet365 Gold Cup Handicap Chase (4.10 p.m.), worth

Davina Smyth

Happy birthday to angry, Terfy Mumsnet

I learned recently that Mumsnet is 25 years old, and my immediate reaction was: who the hell is still using Mumsnet? And then I read that Mumsnet has nine million unique users every month, and my immediate reaction was: who the hell are these people? According to Mumsnet, they’re almost all women, but I don’t seem to know any of them. I’ve never used Mumsnet, and when I conducted some forensically accurate research, I struggled to find any friends who are well acquainted with it. One friend amuses herself occasionally with how middle-class the posts can be, with lots of queries about Eton and sneering at double-barrelled designer baby names.

Wednesday

Zoe Strimpel

Bring on the banter ban

Any sane proponent of Britain’s liberal democratic values should be angry. We are facing an apparent crackdown on our once-robust freedoms in the form of a ban on banter. A tweaked clause in Angela Rayner’s Employment Rights Bill, currently making its way through parliament, says that employers must take ‘all reasonable steps’ to prevent harassment of their staff by third parties. It is intended to relieve ‘anxious’ staff of the fear of going to work and being upset by colleagues or punters, and has caused a total meltdown on the free speech right. Rightly so. The bill could indeed equate to a clampdown on normal back-and-forth between human beings. There

Julia Hamilton

What happened to the filthy rich?

Apparently, it was Lytton Strachey who coined the term ‘filth packets’ when he was describing Virginia Woolf’s room of her own; for Virginia this meant envelopes containing bits of this and that – old nibs, bits of string, used matches, rusty paper clips, all the stuff that gathers on the desk of a writer, or did in the 1920s. According to Lytton, Virginia sat in the kind of armchair very familiar to me to write, which appeared to be suffering from ‘prolapsis uteri’. Nevertheless, in spite of her filth packets, Virginia had staff – albeit not as many as there were in the house where she grew up in Kensington

Nigel Jones

The drama of the Vatican

Next week, after Francis’s funeral, the College of Cardinals will assemble in Rome to choose the man who will lead their Church through these increasingly troubled times. That gathering has become more familiar to a wider, non-Catholic public thanks to the recent films Conclave and The Two Popes – though these are far from the first time that novels and the silver screen have made a drama out of a conclave. This assembly is unlikely to echo the fiction of Robert Harris’s thriller and its screen version starring Ralph Fiennes. The next pope is almost certain to be a liberal in the mould of Francis himself, whereas in Conclave (spoiler

Tuesday

Sean Thomas

Are we too stupid for democracy?

In 1906, Sir Francis Galton observed a crowd at a country fair in Plymouth attempting to guess the weight of an ox. Nearly 800 people participated – from butchers and farmers to busy fishwives. Galton, ever the measurer of men and beasts, gathered the guesses and calculated their average. The result was startling: the crowd’s collective estimate came within one pound of the actual weight. This elegantly simple experiment is the founding parable of what we term the ‘wisdom of crowds’ – the idea that while individuals may be flawed, the collective judgment of a sufficiently diverse group is compellingly accurate. Galton’s experiment also became one of the great justifications