…and lots more harboured in the industry
‘...and lots more harboured in the industry.’
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Wednesday
Someone keeps rearranging the letters on our Toilets sign
‘Someone keeps rearranging the letters on our Toilets sign.’
Let’s see if we can get Bob a GP appointment
‘Right everyone. It’s 7.59. Phones at the ready. Let’s see if we can get Bob a GP appointment.’
The wet weather has influenced everything this year
A lot of people have chosen this hill to die on
‘A lot of people have chosen this hill to die on’
Guns, drugs and beatings – I loved boarding school
My son and various well-meaning friends have been advising me to abandon writing history books and cash in on the trend for boarding school misery memoirs. On the face of it, as someone who was sent away aged seven and remained in these institutions until I was 18, I am well qualified to add my contribution to what has now become a recognised sub-genre of English literature. My problem, though, is that I quite enjoyed my time at boarding schools and I cannot claim – as so many do – that it adversely affected my life; rather the reverse. In his extended essay ‘Such, such were the joys’, George Orwell
The hell of interior design
I spent seven hours yesterday cutting up cardboard boxes into little square pieces with a Stanley knife and stuffing them into rubbish sacks. I’ve just moved house and my home is piled high with bulging black bags and looks like Leicester Square during the Winter of Discontent. Given that I don’t currently have the necessary bin from the council, I could end up living with them forever. These are just some of the stresses of moving into a newly bought flat. Everyone knows the legal process of buying a place is an ordeal – the multitude of documents you can’t find and questions you can’t answer, the survey that over-stresses
Real Southerners never liked Elvis
Cowboy boots are ubiquitous in Nashville – although not hats. ‘That’s Texas,’ one woman told us earnestly. Locals say, ‘y’all,’ ‘yes, ma’am,’ and make eye contact when they speak to you. Despite the lack of cowboy hats, this is still the South. Welcome to Music City, the capital of country and the gleaming buckle of the Bible Belt. Nashville is home to over 700 churches and numerous evangelical choirs. The Union Gospel Tabernacle, built in the 1890s by a Tennessee businessman, was once the largest church in the city. Now its simply the Ryman Auditorium. After the first world war, the owners found they made more cash booking secular performers. The
Tuesday
My teeth are falling out. I won’t miss them
Like many Brits, I never had perfect teeth. Even when I was young they weren’t gleaming white and the two front ones had a gap between them. I grew to quite like my gap – ‘diastema’ to give it the correct name – and found out all kinds of interesting facts about it. In The Canterbury Tales, the ‘gap-toothed Wife of Bath’ symbolised the supposedly lustful nature of diastemata types, who include Madonna and Brigitte Bardot. In some African countries, the condition is considered so attractive that there is a roaring trade in cosmetic dentistry to create it. In France they are known as dents du bonheur – lucky teeth
The stressful world of the Chelsea Flower Show
The man in the Post Office was a bit bemused by the three enormous boxes I was trying to send from my home just outside Edinburgh down to London. He’d asked what the value of the packages was. In one sense, they were worthless, I explained. But I really needed to make sure they got to the Chelsea Flower Show on time because in another sense, they were worth their weight in gold. It didn’t help when I explained that the contents were in fact just dead leaves. The dehydration of the bog myrtle became a proxy for the way the team were feeling These dead leaves have become a
What I resent about my dog
The main benefits of dog ownership are well-known – you get companionship, unconditional love and the exercise that comes with taking the thing for a walk. But there’s a side-effect that no one ever mentions: having a dog teaches you what it’s like to be famous. I’ll be sitting in a café, happily reading a book or doing a sudoku. Then someone appears. ‘Do you mind if I say hello to your dog?’ ‘Of course not,’ I reply. They start fussing about him, and there’s a brief exchange in which the essentials are disclosed. ‘Ralph’, ‘lurcher’, ‘we think he’s eight – the rescue centre guessed he was three when they
Monday
The internet is getting worse
In Gerald Weiner’s book The Secrets of Consulting, there is a case study in which a bright MBA graduate tells a giant multinational burger chain to eliminate just three sesame seeds from each bun to save the company $126,000 a year, under the assumption that none of the customers will notice. This works, so the next year they remove five sesame seeds, and, each year or two, they remove some more, until the bun is barely recognisable. Suddenly, nobody buys their burgers anymore. I get the sense that nothing on the internet really works – or at least no longer works for us I would suggest that the same thing has
Our strange relationship with columnists
I’ve been reading newspapers since I was a teenager and have become strangely familiar with those who write about their lives, even though I’ve met very few of them. Recently, this has gone from being a moderately amusing side interest to an increasingly sad one. In the late 1990s we lived a few doors down from Times columnist Robert Crampton, in Hackney. We had dinner with the Cramptons a couple of times and found them perfectly affable. And then we moved. So I haven’t seen him in years. But were I to bump into him now, I’m pretty certain he’d be struggling to remember who I was, whereas I’d be more: ‘How
Sunday
Did anyone really think Manchester City wouldn’t win the Premier League?
Manchester City have been crowned Premier League champions for an unprecedented fourth time in a row. They go into the record books after beating West Ham 3-1 at the Etihad stadium. It is a remarkable feat: never in 135 years of English league football has a club won four consecutive top-flight titles. City can arguably lay claim to be the greatest team in the league’s history. They have an FA Cup final to look forward to next weekend, a game in which they are hot favourites to sweep aside a dysfunctional and underperforming Manchester United. That would be a cup and league double on the heels of the remarkable Treble
Saturday
The brutal philosophy of Tyson Fury
Tyson Fury, the towering British behemoth with the quick wit and even quicker fists, is ready to fight Oleksandr Usyk. Unlike Usyk, however, Fury is not just a pugilist; he’s a spectacle. He’s one of boxing’s greatest assets because he’s not just in the business of winning fights. Fury’s journey from rage to riches is as compelling as any Hollywood script, and he’s proven himself as much a showman as a slugger. His trash talk is legendary, a verbal ballet of insults that leaves opponents flustered and fans roaring. In this arena, he’s often compared to another icon of the fight game: Conor McGregor. Both men share a knack for
Friday
Two long shots for Newbury tomorrow
The classiest race this weekend is the Group 1 Al Shaqab Lockinge Stakes at Newbury (tomorrow, 3.35 p.m.) in which the French-trained Big Rock and the Newmarket-trained Inspiral are understandably vying for favouritism. They are officially the two top rated horses in the race and they both finished last season on a high: Big Rock won the Group 1 Queen Elizabeth II Stakes at Ascot on Champions Day by a comfortable six lengths, while John and Thady Gosden’s Inspiral travelled to America and won the Grade 1 Maker’s Mark Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Turf by a neck under a strong Frankie Dettori ride. In fact, the two horses ran against each
The hypocrisy of the fame-shy famous
Three years ago, I started employing actors, when I had my first play in the Brighton Fringe. I always think they slightly disapprove of me as I’m a fidget and tend to leave rehearsals early (as I remarked to my husband and co-writer of the latest one as we hightailed it off to the pub one day after only an hour of watching our cast run lines: ‘We didn’t ask them to sit in the room and watch us write the ruddy thing, did we?’) but I love to observe them. In fact, I find it almost too affecting an experience, which could explain my reluctance to watch them too
The descent of the Cambridge ball
I went to quite a few May balls in my three years as an undergraduate at Cambridge. As an editor at the student newspaper I blagged my way into the top ones – Magdalene, Trinity and John’s – since they were stupidly expensive and even as a 20-year-old student I had the sense to feel it should be many years before anything to do with enjoyment was worth more than £20, let alone £100-plus. The university now packages its student experience, from the academic to the social, in the neurotic, righteous language of ‘safety’ and ‘inclusion’ The price certainly ensured a very high degree of pretentiousness – even by Cambridge
The greatest rockstar you’ve never heard of
A man takes the stage at the Clapham Grand. His large, histrionic eyes are ringed with kohl. His slim limbs are decked in spandex, open to a furry navel. He throws back his flaxen hair and punches the air. ‘Thunder!’ he yells to the opening salvo of the AC/DC tub-thumper ‘Thunderstruck’. His name is Mac Savage and I used to know him at school. The set that follows is a greatest hits of the 1980s and 1990s, from Bono to Britney. And there are revelations. Did you ever notice, for instance, how tender the lyrics are to Tina Turner’s ‘The Best’? Or how terrible they are to ‘The Final Countdown’? And Mac
Wednesday
He might get back in…
‘He might get back in...’
