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Friday

Druin Burch

What the NHS and Hezbollah have in common

The NHS uses 130,000 pagers, 10 per cent of the world’s total, and a fraction that slightly increased on 17 September when several thousand of those belonging to Hezbollah exploded. In fact, the NHS, where I work, and Hezbollah share certain problems when it comes to communication infrastructure. A few years ago, I was delighted to see a ward computer with a floppy disk drive – 5.25”, of all things, and be thankful if you’re too young to know the difference between that and 3.5”. To experience the tyranny of a pager, to wear a small device on one’s belt and live under its fickle imperious sway, is to understand

Zoe Strimpel

Middle-aged Swifties are weird

The Starmers were supposed to have the moral high ground – at least according to Labour eschatology – and yet we read of their grubby relationship mega-donor Waheed Alli. Alli was given a security pass to 10 Downing Street in return for his money. During the election, he lent Team Keir the use of his £18 million Covent Garden home. Lady Starmer, meanwhile, certainly has time and taste for more than NHS occupational health work. Vics was pictured front row at the show of London Fashion Week’s wokest designer, Edeline Lee, dressed head to toe in Lee’s own creation, a polka dot dress (on loan), worth over £1,000. Altogether, Vicky

Wednesday

Philip Womack

Britain needs more royals

If King Charles wants a ‘slimmed down’, low-calorie royal family, we can thank Queen Victoria for bequeathing us the plus-size version. Responding in horror to the antics of her naughty uncles, who raked about being unsuitable and having mistresses, she set herself and her nine children to public duty and procreation: go forth and multiply, indeed. Her grandson George V envisaged a vast, bemedalled horde, trotting all over the Empire. At one point in the early 20th century, you couldn’t move for minor royals. Oops – mind that equerry! Edinburghs, Waleses, Connaughts, Fifes: you couldn’t visit a hospital without witnessing a royal plaque unveiling. And they were popular, too. My

Monica Porter

The truth about the wild Sixties

I grew up in the America of the 1960s, an era renowned for its kaftan-wearing hippies, its ethos of free love and hallucinogens, and demos against the Vietnam War. This was something that caught the imagination of my two London-born, English sons, once they were old enough to have acquired some knowledge of recent social history. And they naturally assumed I’d been part of that whole scene, with flowers in my hair and love beads around my neck, smoking pot and blasting out Jimi Hendrix records from a bedroom hung with Che Guevara posters. They took it as read that I was at the legendary Woodstock music festival and danced

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Why Genoa is my new favourite city

Getting to Genoa is quite a schlep and, unforgivably, like a spoiled child, I got grumpy. The only direct flight is from Stansted and who the heck wants to travel from Stansted? Nobody. Especially those of us who live in Brighton. So, Mrs Ray and I flew from Gatwick to Milan Malpensa, took a train to Milano Centrale, kicked our heels for 90 minutes and then took another damn train to Genova Brignole. We were delayed every step of the way, and it took bloody ages: 13 hours. We were knackered and I was shirty – we should have gone from Stansted. Idiots. By the time we’d had a brace

Tuesday

G.V. Chappell

Confessions of a gentrifier

The backlash against plans for a Gail’s bakery in Walthamstow made me think about my own experience of gentrification. When I moved to my suburb of Bristol nearly 20 years ago, it was still a largely white working-class area. It was also a temporary home to many of the students from the local university. It felt slightly down at heel but, judging by the impressive size of some of the houses, had once been quite prosperous. Black and white photographs from the early 20th century show the now non-existent tram running down a high street populated by soberly dressed Edwardians. Friends who live in the city and went to the

James Jeffrey

An apocalyptic dog walk in Seville

She looked up at me imploringly from the simmering pavement as the sun beat down on one man and his dog in Seville. ‘You haven’t peed yet, Amaya, we need to walk on a bit more,’ though I realised the injustice, as we were both so dehydrated neither of us had much chance of fulfilling such obligations. I found myself unexpectedly dog-sitting in the Andalusian capital after my English landlady got rather tipsy and, in a moment of reckless abandon, committed to booking a flight back to the UK to spend time with her family for the first time in a year. I don’t mind the sun especially; it reminds

Adam Hay-Nicholls

The grotesque world of supercar towers

As an 11-year-old, I tried to persuade my mother that we should sell our Victorian farmhouse in the Wiltshire countryside and pour every penny into a brand-new 212mph Jaguar XJ220, which cost £435,000 at the time. We would simply live inside this low-slung two-seat supercar, parked up in a lay-by with a washing line hung between the car aerial and a nearby tree. ‘We’re not just doing that to be cool, we’re doing it because it makes us more money’ Now an alternative has arisen. Car manufacturers are racing to build luxury residential towers in the enclaves of flashy money. In Miami and Dubai, Mercedes-Benz is putting the three-pointed star on

Monday

Sean Thomas

Cambodia’s return to joy

In Cambodia, everybody is looking forward to Bon Om Touk. If your Khmer is a bit rusty, this means the mid-autumn New Moon Water Festival, celebrated in late October. This fervent, noisy, firework-banging festival has multiple, colourful meanings. For a start, it marks the end of the endless summer rain – which turns everyone’s laundry mouldy and gets a tad annoying. It also marks the moment when the fertile Tonle Sap river, which rolls through the sprawling, youthful, trafficky, heat-struck, palm-shaded, jacaranda-adorned, busy-yet-languid, skyscraper-sprouting city, does a handbrake turn. That is to say, around that time of year, and for complex hydrogeographic reasons, the Tonle Sap reverses itself, flowing backwards