Uncategorized

Friday

James Innes-Smith

The Good Life simply wasn’t very good

A new documentary is to be screened later this year celebrating 50 years of everybody’s favourite 1970s sitcom The Good Life. I will not be joining in with the festivities. During the two-hour show, 85-year-old Penelope Keith, who played the irascible Margo Leadbetter, will revisit some of the original locations, including Kewferry Road in Northwood, which stood in for fictional Acacia Avenue in Surbiton – I can feel your excitement growing. The producers have also promised to recreate some of the creaky old sets – OK, calm down at the back. While I’m all for a bit of nostalgia, do we really need to keep reminding ourselves how innocent TV

Thursday

Penworthy

A trio of tips for day three of Royal Ascot

At first glance, today’s Britannia Stakes handicap (5 p.m.) at Royal Ascot looks an impossible puzzle to solve. No less than 30 three-year-old runners are due to line up and plenty of them are plot horses that will go on to win off much higher official marks than they are running from today. However, my strong fancy for this race is PAROLE D’ORO to pull off a coup that has been some two years in the planning. This lightly-raced colt has only run three times in his career, just enough to earn a handicap rating. Each of his three runs has seen an improvement but I am convinced the best

Wednesday

Penworthy

Three wagers for day two of Royal Ascot

The Grade 1 Prince of Wales Stakes at Royal Ascot today (4.20 p.m.) is an intriguing contest in which five of the nine runners are priced up at 6-1 or less. Los Angeles and Anmaat will renew their rivalry from the Tattersalls Gold Cup at the Curragh last month when the former beat the latter by half a length. That form, with highly-rated rivals Kalpana in third and White Birch in fourth, looks red hot and so it is not surprising to see these two horses at the top of the market today for this 10-furlong race worth £600,000 to the winning connections. However, at the prices, I am going

Sean Thomas

Bluesky is dying

In the middle of Cairo there’s a place called the City of the Dead. It is a dusty sprawl of mausoleums, sepulchres and crumbling Mameluke tombs, that has housed the corpses of the city for over a thousand years. On a dank winter’s dusk, it feels especially lifeless – deformed dogs vanish into shadows, random fires burn vile rubbish. But that’s when you notice children’s toys. Cheap clothes drying outside a tomb. And you realise, with a shudder: my God, some poor people live here. That, roughly, is the vibe on Bluesky today. Ironically, Bluesky is now much nastier than Twitter In case you’ve forgotten, Bluesky is the social media

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The Poundland paradox

‘Poundland sells for a pound’ is one of those stories of which sub-editors dream – not to mention the beleaguered company’s PR department. But irony aside, the news does draw attention to a paradox: why do discount stores seem to suffer more in bad economic times than they do in good times? It’s like Ratners, which boomed during the loadsamoney years of the late 1980s, only to flounder during the early 1990s slump, admittedly with a bit of help from its chief executive, Gerald Ratner, who called one of his company’s products ‘total crap’. Shouldn’t recessions, or times of anaemic growth as we have now, be good for shops that

Philip Womack

I’m pseudy and proud

What does it mean to be a ‘pseud’? I hadn’t thought a great deal about it, until a passage from a piece I’d written about semicolons made it into Private Eye’s venerable Pseuds Corner. It appears just after a conversation between two AIs, and above a breathless quote from Meghan Markle (for it is she). Members of the public submit what they consider to be ‘pseudy’, and everyone laughs. I’ve always enjoyed it, and I was so delighted to be featured (I mean, Will Self’s been in there!) that the column is on its way to the framers as we speak. To share some pages with Craig Brown, whose satirical

Tuesday

Penworthy

Five bets for day one of Royal Ascot

The two staying handicaps on day one of Royal Ascot – the Ascot Stakes and the Copper Horse Stakes – are always among my favourite betting races of the week. In both of today’s races, I first look out for a horse that is well handicapped on the flat compared with its hurdles form. Willie Mullins’ Poniros most certainly ticks that box having won the JCB Triumph Hurdle at 100-1 before showing that was no fluke being second to his old rival Luamba in the equivalent Grade 1 event at the Punchestown festival early last month. Poniros undoubtedly has a big chance of landing the Ascot Stakes (5 p.m.) but

Arabella Byrne

Ascot has been ruined by the middle classes

Today, I go to Ascot. The last time I darkened the turf of the Royal Enclosure was in 2017, when I was heavily pregnant with my first daughter. In the photograph of my husband and me that day, I resemble a whale with a plate attached to its head, while my husband looks as if he might at any moment burst into flames from wearing tails and top hat in a heatwave. As you can imagine, we both look rather cross. Curiously, though, on the edge of the photo, there appears to be another couple posing for the camera who look to be having a brilliant time. The gentleman is

Diana Hendry

Am I ready for Turkey teeth?

My parents both had false teeth. My mother had all her teeth taken out one winter afternoon. I can remember her huddled by the electric fire with a small bowl of blood beside her, mourning their loss. It was a loss not just of teeth but of youth. She can’t have been much over 40. Because of her I feel rather proud of the fact that I’ve managed to hang on to mine. I tell this to my dentist, Marcus. He’s not impressed. I should have guessed by my stint watching the video in the waiting room of a blonde whitening her teeth and smiling. Just hanging on to them

Alexander Larman

The lost art of late dining

One of the most memorable dinners I ever had was about 20 years ago, at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Fitzrovia called Pied à Terre. It’s still going, and indeed remains a stalwart of the city’s fine dining scene, but what I especially remember, rather than the food or wine, was how deliciously louche an experience it was. I couldn’t get a booking before 9 p.m., and by the hour that I turned up, it was packed to the rafters with well-heeled diners. My guest and I were kept happy with complimentary champagne until we finally sat down for dinner sometime after 10 p.m. In my (admittedly hazy) recollection, we didn’t