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Wednesday

Richard Bratby

I’m an unrepentant sportsphobe

It’s 1 a.m. in our small cathedral city and car horns are honking in jubilation. From down the street comes the sound of smashing bottles, and a deep bellowing roar, growing louder as the ‘whooahs’ and the chants echo off Georgian terraces. Well, it’s a country town on a Saturday night; a certain amount of lairiness is priced in. But God, this lot seem loud. Football? Rugby? I’m sure I read somewhere that an Olympics is due. One thing is clear, though: the sports people are doing sports stuff again and no power on earth will stop them. All you can do about it – all you’ve been able to

John Sturgis

In defence of the vest

I have been fond of vests ever since those plain white cotton ones we wore for primary school athletics in the long ago and mythically hot summers of the mid-1970s. No other garment in the male warm weather wardrobe is quite the same. A T-shirt isn’t as breathable, while a loose linen shirt even half unbuttoned doesn’t allow the cooling air to play around the shoulders in the same way. And neither allow you to catch the sun on your skin so pleasingly. They only really come into play in high summer: you wouldn’t attempt one in May or September. But for July and August, when, in a good year,

Zoe Strimpel

A beginner’s guide to baby gear

As an urban-dwelling, free-spirited 41-year-old with sleep issues and a whimsical trade – writing – having a baby posed many challenges. The chief of which has been having to constantly work with two other people: baby and baby-daddy. I vowed as the due date approached to get kitted up in ways that would feel reassuring, limiting the cannonball splash effect of the new arrival. Would I be able to spend my way out of the bits of ensnarement I feared most? The answer is: sort of. Here are the items that have got me closest to living my best self as a new old mum. Call it Mum and the City.  Sleep For this, there is

Tuesday

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

My life as a trainee civil servant

In 1987, when I was 19, I started at my first ‘proper’ adult job. This was as a lowly civil service clerk, or administrative officer – filing, basically. It was a post within the Lord Chancellor’s Department – as it was known then – but which today is called the Ministry of Justice, which doesn’t sound totalitarian or sinister at all. It was an epochal life stage, and a winter that was full of scents and sensations, the way winters are in the summer of one’s years. How would we deal with a hypothetical situation where somebody – identity unknown – had dry-boiled the office kettle? Part of the process

Steve Morris

The importance of the Great British curry house

Back in 1979, I took my grandmother and her friend Frances to Monty’s in Ealing. Monty’s was one of the early Indian restaurants in London. My nan was in her 90s, and it was her first curry. We ordered the usual array of dishes – the sizzling tandoori, the Bombay aloo, the dal. My nan and her friend, both Eastenders, tucked in. They wondered why it had taken so long to go for an Indian. In the curry house, we are somewhere different, somewhere with a bit of glamour even Midway through the meal, a door at the side of the restaurant opened and in came Old Mr Monty, the

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

Japan’s weird celebrity culture is coming to Britain

The Japanese singer, actor and heartthrob Matsumoto Jun, who I’ve always thought of as an Oriental David Cassidy (thus showing my age), will make his UK acting debut later this year when he appears in acclaimed playwright Hideki Noda’s very loose adaptation of the Brothers Karamazof at Sadler’s Wells. Jun is, not to sell him short, a superstar in Japan. It should be quite an event. In many ways, Japan (and South Korea’s) talent factory is like a throwback to the Hollywood star system of the 1920s to 1960s If you can’t get your head round the David Cassidy analogy, perhaps Harry Styles would be more meaningful, though even the

Monday

Monica Porter

The London of my youth is gone

I fell in love with London when I arrived here as a teenager at the start of the 1970s. Straight out of an American suburban high school, I’d dreamed of the great metropolis of Shakespeare and Dickens, and I vowed never to leave. Why would I, when, as Dr Samuel Johnson famously declared, ‘He who is tired of London is tired of life’? If I am to depart this city which no longer feels entirely like home, where to go? Half a century on, I regret to say that leaving the capital is the very step I’m now considering. I’m not sure I love it anymore and, to be frank,

Kristina Murkett

Don’t let Netflix ruin Lost

It’s July 2024, and Netflix has decided we have to go back. In honour of the 20th anniversary of the pilot, all six series of Lost have been uploaded to Netflix in the US, and now younger audiences get to experience one of the biggest pop culture obsessions of the noughties for the first time. This character-driven, mythologically-rich, Emmy-winning existential island adventure was once so popular (it averaged between 11 and 18 million viewers a series) that the White House pledged not to disrupt the final season’s premiere with President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. I even loved the notoriously divisive finale, which didn’t necessarily resolve many of

Sunday

John Sturgis

Proper football fans don’t chuck pints

Many previous football tournaments have had a signature motif: the Mexican wave in 1986, the irritating vuvuzelas in South Africa 2010, the firework up the backside in London in 2021. At Euro 2024, that motif has been the hurling of plastic beer glasses. They have been thrown, in celebration or anger, by the Croatians, the Serbs, the Albanians, the Dutch, the Spanish, by our German hosts and by the excitable Scots. The latter would doubtless have thrown more had they had cause, or stuck around longer. But it was their use as projectiles by England fans which attracted most media attention – and which is likely to result in a fine

Friday

Mark Mason

Farewell, Jimmy Anderson

Forget the extraordinary achievements – the reason we’re going to miss James Anderson is that, as a man, he’s so ordinary. Yes, he’s played more Tests for England than anyone else (188), and taken more wickets (701 and counting, at least for another day or two). Indeed his haul is easily the best by any fast bowler in the world – only the spinners Muttiah Muralitharan and Shane Warne did better, Warne by a very slim margin. Goodbye then, Jimmy, you routine superstar, you everyday hero Anderson has bowled more Test maidens than Phillip de Freitas bowled Test overs. (This is a tribute to the former rather than a dig

Penworthy

Three more tips for ‘Super Saturday’

Armchair sports fans are in for a treat this weekend and I am not just talking about England’s appearance in the final of Euro 2024 or the Wimbledon finals. Racing enthusiasts can look forward to watching 11 races on ITV tomorrow afternoon spread over just 170 minutes. This is so-called ‘Super Saturday’ when there is almost endless live action from three big meetings: Newmarket, York and Ascot. It’s not all about quantity either because there is quality too: Newmarket stages the Group 1 My Pension Expert July Cup (4.35 p.m.) and there are plenty of other high-class races, handicaps and non-handicaps alike, on all three cards. The July Cup, over

Ettie Neil-Gallacher

Can AI save my marriage?

I recently went to a conference on the impact of artificial intelligence on the wine industry. It was not immediately obvious why this would have any relevance to my life. I know nothing about AI, having decided not to bother experimenting with it after being reassured by my delightful first cousin once removed that as it still can’t generate convincing Petrarchan sonnets, mankind has nothing to fear. (Yes, he is at Oxford.) And it’s perhaps more shameful that – despite being married to a master of wine – I know so little about booze; I can’t even claim to know what I like, but mercifully he does. Five years ago,

Jane Robins

The BBC doesn’t understand Wimbledon

The tennis is great, but an equally impressive aspect of Wimbledon is how well it has managed tradition. When I visited last week, the first time in a decade, everything was beautifully and reassuringly familiar. The clean thwack of the rackets, the running of the ball boys, the military-style precision and bearing of the ball girls. The portly line judges peering over blue-striped bellies, hands splayed on white-trousered knees, exhibiting all the concentration and intensity of a surgeon about to make his first cut. Naturally, one was the spit of James Robertson Justice. When Wimbledon has had to embrace change, it has somehow managed it without causing offence How do

Wednesday