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Friday

Ameer Kotecha

The Swedish model: Ikea’s restaurant puts others to shame

Ikea has opened its first high-street restaurant in the UK. There’s not a flat-pack in sight – but a hotdog is 85p and a children’s pasta dish with tomato sauce (plus soft drink and piece of fruit) is 95p. A nine-piece full English will set you back £3.75, while a serving of their famous meatballs (with mash, peas, cream sauce and lingonberry jam) is £5.50. Vegetarians are amply catered for. It’s open 12 hours a day (and that may be extended further to enable dinner). There’s free wifi and somewhere to charge your phone. Even better, there is no music. It’s not pretending to be anything it isn’t. And in

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Hotels are good for the soul

I love hotels. Growing up, my family never stayed in them (we were poor but we were honest, M’Lud). Instead we went to Butlin’s, sharing a tiny ‘chalet’, or we stayed at bed and breakfasts; private lodgings where you got exactly those two things but had to be out and about during the daylight hours – come hell, high water or hailstones. For those too young to have experienced them, a B&B is basically the exact opposite of an Airbnb, where you’re allowed to stay in every single moment of every day you’ve hired it for, if that’s what turns you on. I’ve only stayed in one Airbnb, which was

Sean Thomas

Why Britain needs Shinto

Ise, Japan They say of Japan that if you come here for a week, you want to write a novel about Japan. After a year, maybe a few essays. After a decade, a page. It is one of those countries which seems to get simultaneously more fascinating and opaque. Possessing an ancient monarchy is like having a Gothic cathedral in your back garden So it is for me, on this, my first trip to Japan in 30 years (I lived in Kyoto in the mid-1990s). This time around I have been doing prep by reading the early history of Shinto, the ‘state religion’ of Japan, an animist creed which sees

Wednesday

Arabella Byrne

The anti-smoking drugs don’t work

Ten years ago, I decided that I should stop smoking. Before this decision, I had never given it a second thought. ‘Want to step outside for another? Yes please.’ Who cared about the wind blowing in from the Urals as we huddled around a lighter? Not I. Had I been ready to quit now, a new directive from the NHS, announced by Health Secretary Wes Streeting yesterday, offers smokers a free pill, varenicline, which notionally works by ‘binding to receptors in the brain to stop people craving or enjoying nicotine’. The decision to offer pills is part of the ‘prevention is better than cure’ narrative also being rolled out to

Nigel Jones

The lost thrill of the thriller

I will not be joining in the praise heaped on the current Sky remake of Frederick Forsyth’s classic thriller The Day of the Jackal. Apart from the fact that the series’ star Eddie Redmayne – who plays the Jackal, an ice-cold hitman – is about as menacing as a field mouse, the new Jackal is very much a woke version of the story, complete with a far-right German Chancellor who is one of the Jackal’s victims. Eddie Redmayne’s Jackal is about as menacing as a field mouse Forsyth himself, a solidly right-wing Tory, seems to share my lukewarm opinion of the new adaptation of his masterpiece. He damned Redmayne with

Zoe Strimpel

Canary Wharf is better than ever

For the kind of people who think London ought to be all Farrow and Ball-coated quaintness and whiffs of Dickensianism, Canary Wharf is a rude assault, an obnoxious jungle of the anti-quaint. It is also, to many, an embarrassing paean to a moment that only the 1980s could have produced: one of gauche capitalistic, deregulatory optimism soused in international finance. One Canada Square, the frontispiece of the development and once Britain’s tallest skyscraper, is named in honour of the Toronto-based property developer who bought the project in 1988 (and a few years later went bankrupt). I found myself dazzled anew, less by capitalistic intensity and more by mystery Canary Wharf,

Tuesday

James Maker

Today’s oldies don’t envy the young

Next year, I will be 65. At 65, one leaves the plateau of middle age and enters the foothills of senescence. For some, it’s an uneventful milestone marked by tidying up some herbaceous borders or experimenting with pesto; others yield to mortal panic and max out their credit card on something wildly impractical. On reaching this jubilee, an acquaintance of mine dyed his hair jet black. This is inadvisable because rather than restoring the appearance of youth and vigour, one emerges from the bathroom looking haunted, like a persecuted homosexual solicitor in a Dirk Bogarde film. . There is no shortage of stories of those who suddenly foreswore all earthly

Ameer Kotecha

All hail the microwave!

Marco Pierre White may have earned a reputation as the tousle-haired kitchen bad boy who once made Gordon Ramsay cry, but these days he spends his mornings rather more quietly, enjoying his kippers. Yet in his retirement, he can still cause controversy. He recently told a podcast how he cooks his kippers. ‘On a plate, paint it with butter, wrap in cling film, in the microwave, two to two and a half minutes.’ A microwave? Really, Marco?! Yes. As far as kippers go, his reasoning is spot on. ‘Most people put them under the grill, which intensifies the salt’. Meanwhile, boiling them – jugged kippers – washes away the flavour.

Lucy Denyer

Helping veterans find their next mission

Last month, Keir Starmer made an announcement that sounded full of governmental largesse. From henceforth, the Prime Minister said, ex-servicemen would be exempt from local connection tests for social housing for ever, guaranteeing them a roof over their heads. ‘The military is a brilliant mechanism for social mobility… but it can be difficult to continue that upward trajectory when you leave’ Leaving aside the fact that the announcement did nothing to actually increase the amount of social housing available, or that the lack of housing generally means an ever-widening gap between civilian and military life, why would someone leaving the service need access to social housing for ever? Perhaps because