Uncategorized

Wednesday

Zak Asgard

Nothing beats the Great British caravan holiday

Air travel isn’t what it used to be. I think we can all admit that. Those of us who don’t fly British Airways on a regular basis understand the true pandemonium of trying to get to Luton Airport at 3am with an Uber driver half asleep at the wheel. We understand what it means to sit on the tarmac for two hours with the smell of faecal matter and burp being pumped around by a broken air-conditioning unit. We understand what it is to pay £10 for a bath-warm Coke and a pressurised packet of pringles that will inevitably explode into the aisle.  So, what can we do about it?

Ella Dorn

The vanity of Just Stop Oil

Just Stop Oil have spent the past year vandalising their way through the National Gallery in the over-orchestrated manner of a Cluedo suspect. Once it was Constable’s Hay Wain in Room 34 with a bit of glue. Then van Gogh’s Sunflowers in Room 43 with a Warholian can of tomato soup. The newest casualty is Velázquez’s seventeenth-century Rokeby Venus, its protective glass smashed in several places by miniature safety hammers. Readers may at this point catch onto a sense of déjà vu. The nude Venus had already been victimised in 1914 by suffragette Mary Richardson in the National Gallery with a meat cleaver. She aimed to avenge the government’s treatment

Tuesday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why should my cricket club have to tackle climate change?

Is there anything left which hasn’t been overtaken by climate change drivel? In my spare time I serve as chairman of a village cricket club in East Anglia: a club which I and others, against the grain of the contracting world of village cricket, have succeeded in setting up from scratch over the past dozen years. From what was a wheat field as recently as 2010, we now have a cricket ground which is used not only by our own club but also another local club. In all, we had nearly 40 fixtures on the ground this past season. All this, needless to say, takes money, both to set up

Tom Haggie

The glamour of a Dunhill Rollagas lighter

Sometimes a small purchase gives an outsize amount of pleasure. I have felt this recently with a particularly robust pair of replacement boot laces and an especially bobbly, Italianate lemon. But most satisfying amongst all these small pleasures has been a lighter. Specifically, a Dunhill Rollagas lighter from eBay. Clearly an object of the 1960s, they are about £1,000 when new. This is far too much for me. However, they retail second hand for between roughly £25 and £200. Of course, even £25 is obviously a great deal for a lighter. But, for this investment, you receive a fantastically luxurious object. The pleasure is very like that which I imagine

Alec Marsh

We need an international University Challenge

As the autumn nights close in and the heating goes, there are few pleasures so improving for body and soul than half an hour spent in the company of University Challenge. Not only do you learn a bit (well, until you forget it) but nothing makes a middle-aged man or woman of a certain disposition quite so happy as knowing that they can still best a bunch of 19-year-olds when it comes to elite trivia. So here’s a thought – why do we keep this beloved split-screen televisual wunder-quiz to ourselves? Why do we hoard it? After all, we were gracious enough to give the world the blessing of football.

Monday

John Sturgis

Against all odds, I’ve started to like Phil Collins

This isn’t easy for me. In fact, it is perhaps the most difficult public admission I’ve ever made. I’m worried about how people will react, how friends and colleagues might reconsider their opinion of me after reading this. But I can’t keep it locked up secretly inside me any longer. I have to admit it. I’m starting to quite like Phil Collins. This isn’t a fully fledged commitment – it’s not something I’d die on a hill for. But I’m unmistakably starting to warm to the chirpy, balding balladeer. This is particularly shocking because for at least a decade, from the early eighties to early nineties, he was, for me,

Calla Jones Corner

Confessions of a speeding granny

I suppose it was going to happen. But not inevitably. After 66 years behind the wheel, I’ve finally gotten a speeding ticket. In France. During those years, I’ve put the pedal to the metal in an Alfa Romeo (Spider Veloce with Weber carburetors), a zippy MG (my mother’s), a 375HP Corvette Stingray (my first husband’s), occasionally an e-type belonging to a friend and a swanky but stodgy Mercedes. A French camera finally caught up with me as I was ripping up a Burgundian country road from Nolay to Autun, going 105 kph in a 90 kph zone in my new (to me) Mini Cooper. My grandchildren have begun to love

Sean Thomas

The Welsh Marches: England’s foodie frontier

I’m in a car embarking on a road trip through one of the great foodie regions of the world, charged with the onerous task of scoffing and boozing my way through five days of epicurean heaven. But where am I? Trundling along the Rhone valley from Lyon to Provence? Barrelling down the autostrada to Bologna? No, I’m on the A458 just outside Shrewsbury. Because this is a tour of the Welsh Marches, England’s foodie frontier, from Shropshire through Herefordshire to Gloucestershire, where a food and drink revival over the last three decades has turned this lush, fertile, famously green corner of Britain into a gastro-destination as good as any in