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Friday

Penworthy

Three bets for Aintree today and tomorrow

Tomorrow’s Randox Grand National (4 p.m.), the world’s most famous horse race, is the highlight of an excellent card at Aintree and I think the bookies have got it right with the horses they have put at the top of the market. Stumptown, who could yet go off as favourite, is the best weighted horse in the race given that he would be given several pounds more if the handicapper was allowed to take his recent Cheltenham Festival win into consideration. His victory by seven lengths in the Glenfarclas Cross Country Chase came, however, after the weights were published and this is a race in which there are no winning

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The curious cult of Dubai-style chocolate

Dubai-style chocolate, viral star of TikTok and Instagram, is so popular that Waitrose is limiting sales to two bars per customer. The upmarket supermarket chain has taken the move, the Times reports, ‘because we want everyone to have the chance to enjoy this delicious chocolate’. Some are sceptical. Steve Dresser, who heads up consultancy Grocery Insight, has questioned whether this is a marketing ploy, with Waitrose ‘trying to generate scarcity’. The supermarket says no, assuring the Grocer of the ‘incredible popularity’ of these £10 confectionery bars. It’s incredible all right. Even Waitrose’s yellow sticker fare is beyond my budget, so to me a tenner for a slab of chocolate sounds

Zoe Strimpel

Finally, we’re cracking down on buskers

At last, somebody has said it. Busking is akin to psychological torture, especially for those who have to live or work within earshot. This damning comparison came from no less than a judge at the City of London magistrates’ court, following a suit brought by Global Radio, the Leicester Square-based owner of LBC and Classic FM. The judge noted ‘the use of repetitive sounds is a well-publicised feature of unlawful but effective psychological torture techniques’. He found that the ‘volume’ of the buskers’ music was ‘the principal mischief’ but also delivered a damning assessment of the way out-of-tune pop songs are offensive to the human spirit. ‘It is clear that

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

I’m bored by this blossom worship

It’s cherry blossom season in Japan and about half the population (according to a Kansai University study) will gather at the viewing spots to pose for photos (Japanese Instagram may collapse) and enjoy picnics in the shade of the sakura trees. Japan will also welcome close to four million visitors to witness the floral marvel. The season is brief, peaking in about a week and disappearing by the end of April, during which time the progress of the blooms across the country is followed with breathless enthusiasm by reporters on the news bulletins. We are assumed to be, expected to be, giddy with excitement about all this, and to swoon

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

The problem with Oxfam Books

My home city of Oxford has been ravaged by shop closures over the past decade but there is still one outstanding second-hand bookshop (the estimable antiquarian department at Blackwell’s apart) and it’s the Oxfam bookshop on St Giles. Thanks to a regular donations from dons and writers, there are invariably high-quality and interesting items on its shelves, priced sensibly and reasonably. In the past, I reckon I’ve spent a decent three-figure sum there most months, which I persuaded myself was going to developing countries and their good work, rather than growing my unreasonably large collection. Yet I’ve rather fallen out of love with the Oxfam St Giles ever since it

Jonny Ford

My solution to ghosting

Let me tell you a ghost story. I began texting Becky two weeks ago. Soon the messages were flowing. A date was set, a table booked. Friday night. Soho. Here we go. Then, a day before the date, the texts stopped and the lady vanished – leaving me to cancel the restaurant and spend the evening in the company of Wordle. It might be ten years since ‘ghosting’ was added to the dictionary, but the disappearing act has lost none of its sting. It’s also as common as ever: four out of five singletons say they’ve been ghosted. Received wisdom blames the apps. The industrial scale of dating today causes

Druin Burch

Have we finally developed tastebuds?

We British are not famed for culinary daring. An adventurous meal has traditionally been one that lacks potatoes. Nose-to-tail eating is mostly anathema to a nation that prefers the blandest part of the chicken because it’s the easiest to cut up. Poverty and shortage were not enough to spur our creativity during postwar rationing. The food writer Elizabeth David recounted a Scottish schoolmaster’s wife who recoiled in horror at her freshly gathered chanterelles. A fisherman did the same on spotting her with a crab, both reacting with the same appalled cry: ‘You’re never going to eat those dirty things?’ Few in Britain praise dishes of pig’s ears or chicken knees,

Tuesday

Ella Dorn

We need to talk about femcels

Women’s expectations are off. They want men with advanced degrees, but on university campuses, women outnumber their male counterparts. They want men with above-average incomes, but the gender pay gap has been reversed – young women now out-earn men. They want men who share their politics, but in almost every western country over the past decade or so, women have slid to the left while men have remained centrist. NEW: an ideological divide is emerging between young men and women in many countries around the world. I think this one of the most important social trends unfolding today, and provides the answer to several puzzles. pic.twitter.com/kG4qQReqfT — John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) January 26, 2024 This

Colin Freeman

The sad decline of the local paper

Once at my old local paper, the Grimsby Evening Telegraph, a trainee made the mistake of sniggering when asked to cover the allotments sub-committee. ‘Don’t ever fuck with allotment holders,’ the news editor warned. ‘It may not matter to you, but they take those little patches of land very seriously indeed.’ Like most of the news editor’s salty words of wisdom, this advice was forged on the anvil of bitter experience. Grimsby’s allotmenteers guarded their marrow and runner bean patches with a Balkan-esque blood-and-soil passion. The slightest mistake could generate no end of angry phone calls and green-ink letters. I am not sure allotment coverage was quite what King Charles