Uncategorized

Friday

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why is John Lewis selling sex toys?

Well, for the Waitrose classes, it seems you can get all the accessories for middle class eroticism at John Lewis. The store has started selling sex merchandise and the good news is that there’s been a restock this week for Valentine’s Day, which used to be sacred to roses, Charbonnel et Walker chocolates and scent – though excitingly, I was sent an offer of 30 per cent off a subscription to the Economist, billed as the perfect Valentine’s gift (funny people at that magazine). Ann Summers is entering a partnership with Deliveroo: can you think of anything more grim? Anyway, at the John Lewis website, ready to be put in

Alice Loxton

Historian’s notebook: What the Dean of Westminster would save from a burning Abbey

Last Wednesday morning, the Cellarium Café of Westminster Abbey was filled with excitable French visitors. It was the press preview of Notre-Dame de Paris, The Augmented Exhibition. ‘What do you make of our croissants?’ I ask the sharp suited French curator. ‘Comme ci, comme ça’ he chuckles, taking another bite. While Notre Dame undergoes restoration following the 2019 fire, its stewards have toured the world via an immersive digital exhibition, now doing a stint in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey. With an iPad-like device in hand, visitors become une mouche sur le mur of major events in the cathedral’s story: the 12th century building site, Napoleon’s coronation, Viollet-le-Duc’s creation

Wednesday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The fetishisation of failure

Awhile back, I followed the career of the writer Elizabeth Day, but not in a good way; rather, I followed it much as a fly must have followed a muck-cart in the olden days. Her column for the Mail on Sunday, from 2018 to 2021, was quite probably the worst column ever to appear in a newspaper up to that point. I dubbed her The World’s Worst Columnist (and it wasn’t envy, as I had a cushy billet at the Sunday Telegraph at the time) and took great delight in sharing the choice cherries of triteness atop her weekly Sunday sundae of banality with my mates on social media. She

Margaret Mitchell

Celibacy isn’t chic

Abstinence doesn’t typically come to mind when one thinks of Valentine’s Day. But this year it coincides with Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, when we traditionally give something up. (Bear in mind that Christianity recognises a very gruesome torture and death as the ultimate gesture of love. For us, a little bit of suffering seems perfectly in order on a day celebrating love.) White-knuckled sex positivity isn’t serving women’s spiritual needs I was still in Catholic school in Virginia the last time the two days collided. We were, like all teenagers, obsessed with love and fixated on our own nascent desires, although this obsession manifested in strange ways.

Emma Wells

Inside Kelly Castle (baronetcy optional)

For most of us, a cursory flick through an in-flight magazine might lead to the purchase of a G&T, or a bottle of perfume. For Alun Grassick, it was a slightly more substantial investment. When he spotted an ad for a crumbling B Listed castle in the Angus countryside, with its towers, turrets, an associated baronetcy and 33 acres of land, he and his wife bought the property. Since 2001, they have spent an eye-watering £2 million restoring it. The couple had long hankered for a second home in their native country since moving to Hong Kong in the late 1980s. ‘I always had aspirations of owning a large property

Tuesday

John Sturgis

The tyranny of the 20mph limit

I was still thinking about the film when I came out of the cinema and got into my car. I can’t have exceeded 28mph. On this wide, well-lit, almost empty London road at midnight, it was hardly reckless. Nevertheless, this stretch of road is one of hundreds to have had their speed limits reduced from 30mph to 20mph. Had I driven past a camera while reflecting on the ambiguous ending of All Of Us Strangers? I now face an anxious few weeks waiting to find out. When I mentioned this to friends I discovered this anxiety is now a common experience. The last time I got the dreaded speed camera

Sean Thomas

It’s official: modern music is bad

It’s one of the hoariest cliches in popular culture: that every fading generation must, in flailing anger at its own imminent irrelevance, turn on the next generation and say, ‘your music is dire’. From the crusty judge contemptuously asking ‘who are these Beatles’, to the middle-aged outrage surrounding the spitting and pogoing Sex Pistols, to the Tory MP who expressed his horror at the Beastie Boys and Run DMC for ‘mocking disabled children in Montreux’, it is an established human tradition. And of course, it is always nonsense. It turns out the next generation has music of equal brilliance, passion, vivacity, excitement. Pop music once commonly expressed joy, love, energy,

Arabella Byrne

I’m trapped by the village WhatsApp

I live in a village in Oxfordshire. Before we moved here, a WhatsApp group was set up to help the community navigate the pandemic. It was, other villagers tell me, a lifeline. But the village WhatsApp is still going. No longer a herald of government diktats, it is now a busy forum with photos of abandoned parcels, a slow cooker in an unknown kitchen, someone’s cat staring blankly at me, and, most worryingly, a snap of the village playground littered with beer cans. The WhatsApp group seems to have exposed the realities of the rural social contract There are village announcements too, stories of the occasional lost dog and items that people