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As a Brit who has lived in Spain for almost a decade, I must take issue with Zoe Strimpel’s recent article arguing that it’s the ‘worst country […] in western Europe’, at least as a holiday destination. My four years in Granada and almost five in Malaga have shown me that it’s the best place in western Europe to live – but not because of anything to do with ‘progressive’ politics or a Gen-Z dating trend. I find it hard to imagine what city would appear beautiful and romantic to someone who’s unmoved by Granada, Cordoba, or Seville The ‘buzzing terraces’ that Strimpel praises for distracting customers from horrible tapas

It’s Wednesday, which means my evening is booked up for Slow Horses. The usual protracted regime of children’s tea-bath-bed will be compressed into about 10 minutes (packet of crisps, cursory going-over with a wet wipe, withholding of bedtime story on thoroughly spurious grounds) before my husband and I leap onto the sofa like The Simpsons in the opening credits with a bottle of Malbec and a Charlie Bigham’s curry to watch the new episode on Apple TV+. (Gen Z readers: at the risk of lowering the birth rate even further, this is what fun looks like in your forties after three kids.) Weekly episodes now seem quaint, as archaic as

Pull those ripped tartan trews on lads, the Sex Pistols are back! Well, kind of. Lead singer John Joseph Lydon, aka ‘Rotten’, is livid that the other three surviving members have decided to perform a couple of charity gigs without his consent. Really? Punks doing charity gigs? Sid Vicious must be turning in his Pennsylvanian grave. A throng of balding 67-year-olds were pogoing to ‘God Save the King’ while hurling £8 pints of lager at each other The feud goes back to the mid-1970s when Lydon, in typical muso style, vowed to stay true to the music while the other layabouts were more inclined to milk the legacy for all

Sitting in a gigantic marquee on the green edge of Munich, surrounded by thousands of boozy Germans singing along to a Bavarian oompah band, I wonder how I got talked into coming to another Oktoberfest. Last time I came, ten years ago, I hated it and swore I’d never come again, but this time feels different. Maybe it’s the beer talking, but this year the atmosphere seems less manic, more relaxed. There are lots of couples, old and young, and hardly any stag parties. Amid the endless rows of trestle tables I see numerous families in traditional Bavarian dress (the women so alluring in their dirndls, the men faintly ridiculous

When Sven-Göran Eriksson’s coffin was being paraded through the streets of his home town, ahead of his funeral, it was followed by a marching jazz band playing ‘The Bare Necessities’. The song, from Disney’s The Jungle Book, was intended to honour the former England manager’s request that his send-off should be celebratory rather than mournful. But, despite a personal fondness for Sven – which I wrote about here in The Spectator – this choice left a sour note for me. This was because of a perhaps obscure but nevertheless deeply held dislike which I have developed for the fictional character associated with the song: Baloo, the bear. I cannot stand

Up and down they go, criss-crossing the country, cars packed full of stuff. Duvets, pillows, vapes, cuddly toys, packs of cheap pasta and rice, Aldi-brand vodka, clothes horses and apprehension. There are around 1.7 million undergraduates and a third of them, the freshers, are most probably leaving home for the first time.  Some are already at university, including my youngest, who I dropped off at the University of York last week after playing ‘spot the student car’ on the A1. She’ll be studying to become an educational psychologist over the next three years, getting an education herself and a high degree of debt – plus expertise in Pot Noodles. And