Assisted dying
‘I’m confused. Is not getting the winter fuel payment the same as assisted dying?’
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Wednesday
Putin has mucked around with the crackers
‘It’s just as we feared – Putin has mucked around with the crackers.’
One person will be leaving this week
Who cares about Gregg Wallace?
In 1986 the late Martin Amis published a book of essays called The Moronic Inferno – a title he had borrowed from the writers Saul Bellow and Wyndham Lewis. The essays focused on Amis’s dim view of culture in the USA. These aspects of American life have long since crossed the pond, and we are all now living in a Moronic Inferno – a veritable cauldron of cretinism and ignorance. Our public discourse is more concerned with the career of a superannuated slapheaded former market trader At the time of writing this piece, the lead story on national news bulletins for five whole days has been not Gaza, Syria or
Is London the most stylish city on earth?
Let’s face it, there are many reasons not to visit London these days: the crime, the intimidatory protests, the woeful public transport, the eye-popping cost of everything, Sadiq Khan – I could go on. So disillusioned have I become with what was once my favourite place in the world that I fear I may be tiring of it, and thus, perhaps, life. Such thoughts make those assisted dying adverts the mayor has just plastered all over the Tube all the more poignant. We are not talking about fashion here, which I haven’t paid any serious attention to since the zip craze of the early 1990s But there is at least
48 hours in Dublin
I need little excuse to go to Dublin, one of my all-time favourite cities. The only trouble is that recovery between visits takes so long. I’m neither as young nor as thirsty as I once was. And I’m still haunted by a bizarre trip I made many years ago when I hadn’t even intended to visit the Fair City. I’d been at a family party in Co. Down, drinking Guinness with Bushmills chasers for what seemed like days. Next thing I knew, I was waking up starkers three days later It was an accident waiting to happen, of course, and, thanks to too much poitín, the wheels came off spectacularly
Tuesday
Gregg Wallace was no national treasure
To call Gregg Wallace a ‘national treasure’, as some did after his fall from grace last week, was inaccurate. Just because he is (or was) very popular on television does not qualify him. To attain national treasure status, a person needs to be older, as well as much nicer. The expression is vastly overused, lavished on too many undeserving celebrities, and it needs to be reined in. As Julie Burchill (sick to death of them last Christmas) wrote, ‘it seems harder to name a public figure who isn’t one’, and that most of them ‘can’t open their cake-holes without mouthing centrist platitudes which we’ve all heard a million times before’.
Are you brave enough for night shopping?
When it comes to adventures in retail, nighttime shopping is where it all happens: the unusual and most interesting people, the prime parking spaces, the lack of queues and, best of all, the absence of germy, screamy, bored, needy, naggy children. Shopping at night is plentiful in the sticks where I live – the sticks being that area between the outer suburbs and Home Counties proper. It is where you can find both stretches of heath and woodland and still get a decent coffee, speciality breads, etc. Retail parks are open until 8, 9, or even 10, and two epic 24-hour superstores are a mere zoom away in my old
The horror of a Christmas jumper
Mark Darcy’s Christmas jumper has come a long way since it repelled the heroine of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) at her mother’s annual New Year’s Day turkey curry buffet. The green turtleneck, festooned with a red-nosed reindeer, sold for £5,670 at auction in November. Colin Firth has protested that he’s been ‘unfairly blamed for subsequent surges in Christmas sweater sales’. He might have a point. Arguably, Sarah Lund’s snowflake sweater in the 2007 Danish TV series The Killing did more to elevate the garment to high fashion. Because nothing quite marks the birth of God like a Nordic noir police procedural. Frankly, you’ll look more of a wazzock if you
Monday
Are you ready for agentic AI?
It’s an interesting and unusual word, agentic. For a start, some language enthusiasts dislike it as a mulish crossbreed of Latin and Greek. Also, its etymology is obscure. It appears to derive from 20th-century psychology: one of its first usages can be found in a study of the infamous 1960s Milgram experiments at Yale University, when volunteers were persuaded to electrocute, with increasing and horrible severity, innocent ‘learners’ (actually actors). The experiment revealed that most of us would administer a lethal shock of electricity to an innocent human being, if only told to do so by a man in a white coat with a clipboard. That battling lawyerly AI may
Goodbye, Earl’s Court
Earl’s Court as I first remember it was where Australian travellers found a cheap bed for the night. It was also the place to go for beers with unfamiliar labels, and bags of kiwi fruit, a rare delicacy in the 1980s. And at a time when Neighbours was riding high in the TV ratings there was fun to be had eavesdropping on conversations littered with ‘fair dinkum’ and ‘strewth’. There are some troubling details: skyscrapers being built in a largely low-rise Victorian neighbourhood and the way streets at the perimeter of the site will be overlooked and overshadowed Older generations will remember earlier waves of immigrants. There were the Polish
What’s the best film about US politics?
After Donald Trump’s election-win, many junkies of US politics will be needing another fix. But if you’ve already overdosed on Megyn Kelly post-mortems on YouTube or had your fill of Estee Palti’s Kamala imitations, where do you go to head off the pangs till inauguration day next year? Anyone without time for the entire West Wing series could do a lot worse than watch the films below. The first is Nixon (1995), Oliver’s epic three-and-a-half hour movie starring Anthony Hopkins as America’s disgraced 37th president – a surprisingly generous portrayal of a man as reviled by the Left, in his day, as Donald Trump is now. In a film much
Friday
Three bets for tomorrow and a Welsh National tip
As regular readers of this column will know, I often like to back horses from up-and-coming yards, rather than the big stables, in the search of value. A progressive horse is often much bigger odds than he (or she) should be simply because it hails from a yard that is rarely in the spotlight. With this in mind, I am hoping that the consistent mare OOH BETTY will outrun her odds tomorrow for the Dorset yard of Ben Clarke in the ultra-competitive Coral Racing Club Intermediate Handicap Hurdle, better known as the ‘Gerry Fielden’ (Newbury, 2.25 p.m.). There was plenty to like about her last run of the season at
The Groucho Club died years ago
On hearing that the Groucho Club has been closed after the Metropolitan Police alleged ‘a recent serious criminal offence’, I felt a shiver of something I wasn’t quite sure of – one part sorrow, one part joy, shaken over ice-cold memories and served straight up. To some, the Groucho might have been some poncy private members’ club but for me – from 1985 to 1995, between the ages of 25 and 35 – it was where I struck deals and enemies, fell in love with pretty strangers and went off those to whom I had promised to be true. The Groucho is where I became ‘Julie Burchill’, for better or
Bring back suet!
Stir-up Sunday may be behind us, but it’s not too late to make your Christmas pudding – and do you know what that means? Yep, sourcing decent beef suet. Suet is the king of fats. It adds to the pudding’s keeping quality, texture and flavour. My recipe calls for half a pound of suet (see below for the recipe in full – it was my great-aunt’s) but the good stuff is hard to find. You can get pellets of suet in a packet from supermarkets, but the real thing, grated into light flakes, is another story: much nicer and lighter. Some inferior recipes suggest butter instead, but good as butter
The day my mother asked me to kill her
With today’s vote on the assisted dying bill, I am reminded of my mother. Susie was 89, in failing health but of sound mind, when she took me aside at her house in the south of France to tell me she wanted me to kill her. She had no intention, she said, of enduring the humiliation of a decaying memory and a crumbling body, and was determined to avoid the old people’s home, the geriatric ward and the hospice. Some days my mum really wanted to kill herself, and some days she really did not ‘You have to know,’ she said to me, ‘not only when to leave a job,
Wednesday
I’ve got a certificate that says I’m a sheep
‘I’ve got a certificate that says I’m a sheep.’
There will be some pain and some growth
‘There will be some pain and some growth.’
Now on Radio 4
