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There is no clearer demonstration of the difference between America and Britain than their attitudes towards teeth. In America, you fix them. Doesn’t matter if they’re nearly straight. You subject yourself to years of semi-torture to achieve the American dream – a white picket fence of perfectly uniform teeth. Most perfect teeth are artificial – some so artificial that they’ve entirely replaced the real ones When I was about 11, I was taken to the orthodontist to straighten out my slightly overlapping front teeth. I dreaded those appointments. Our orthodontist was a tall, overly friendly man with large hairy fingers which he would shove into my tiny mouth without gloves.

Recently, I was walking down a London street when on the pavement I spotted a worm. It was so motionless I wasn’t sure if it was alive or dead. Normally, I would have passed the worm by without a second thought. But I’d just been to my local park to do stretches, meditation, breathing exercises and to hug my favourite tree. Yes, I have become a tree hugger. I actually put my arms around the tree trunk – or as much as I can manage. I squeeze tight, pressing my body against it to absorb its life-giving energy – and I get wood. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist that joke.) There

Attending an English public school in the 1970s when you weren’t from that world was a tough gig. Mum’s family were from the East End. Dad was what might euphemistically be called a ‘wheeler dealer’. Having had little education, Dad was determined his children wouldn’t suffer the same fate. So my brother and I were privately educated from the age of four. Cars, like everything else, were meant to be expensive but understated. Dad obviously hadn’t read that memo At our public school, I was painfully aware of being an outsider. Although I spoke received pronunciation like my schoolmates – regional accents were verboten – I knew I wasn’t one

If Marcus Aurelius were around today, would he have a podcast? The answer, of course, is no. His meditations were for his own guidance and never knowingly meant to be published. This doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have found himself shoved forward as a hero of a new resistance. His sound bites would be rendered into TikToks while teenagers put his quotations as their phone backgrounds. Twenty-somethings working in industries he couldn’t conceive of (‘digital marketing’? Quid est?) would stutter his words like mantras as they shiver in Clapham back garden ice baths. For stoicism has returned, and in its strangest form yet. The lives of many of those who adopt

Tim Dillon is a comedian who not so long ago worked as a New York tour bus guide and subprime mortgage salesman. He started a podcast from his porch in 2016 and used it to talk about world events, what he and his lowlife friends were up to, and, frequently, to complain about how broke he was.  ‘I understand fighting in Ukraine is tough. But have you ever defended Vladimir Putin at a dinner party in Malibu?’ Today, each episode of The Tim Dillon Show is downloaded more than a million times and subscriptions generate income in excess of $175,000 a month. In early April, he will perform at the

Amelia ‘Milly’ Gentleman, the Guardian’s fearless investigative reporter, has ‘exclusively’ revealed some of the Garrick Club’s filthy secrets. It’s ‘the final gasps’ of ‘a declining patriarchal elite’, she writes. ‘A lonely slice of an England that forgot to modernise’. All over the country, fair-minded folk must be thinking ‘woo, when can I join?’   Clubmen tend to talk about the subject that occupies people wherever they gather: the crooked timber of humanity What is the club’s original sin? To be an all-male enclave deep within the Establishment, which draws its members from the Inns of Court, Whitehall, Westminster, the City, and the West End. What? Judges, senior civil servants, bankers,