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Monday

Rob Crossan

How to save Britain’s pubs

In Bradford a few weeks ago, I popped into a pub called Jacobs Well. It’s a squat old building, all but submerged behind the stultifyingly ugly road that grinds around the edges of the town centre. The Well was fairly quiet on a Monday night, but everyone there was congregated around the bar and it was immediately apparent that this was a place where long friendships are nurtured and strangers are welcomed. There were interesting cask ales, free hotpot and doorsteps of bread on a side table for anyone who fancied a meal, wonderful photos of old Bradford on the walls and a blackboard chock-full of handwritten notices advertising upcoming

Olivia Utley

The unfashionable truth? Early motherhood is wonderful

At the end of last year I developed a pathological aversion to going to my local supermarket, owing to a garish sign in the window counting down the number of ‘sleeps’ until Christmas. The twee Americanism was grating enough, but I had another reason to feel queasy: I was heavily pregnant with my first baby and my due date was Christmas Day. Of course, my husband and I were longing to meet our much-wanted son. But as the day drew inexorably closer and I dived ever deeper into the ubiquitous ‘exposés’ on early motherhood, I began to feel afraid. Is it any wonder? To read pretty much any book, magazine

Philip Womack

The semicolon had its moment; that moment is over

Rend your cheeks and rub ashes into your hair; for that most elegant, elusive of punctuation marks – the semicolon – is, if not yet quite dead, at least fairly close to being on first name terms with St Peter. Research from Babbel, a ‘learning platform’, shows that usage of the semicolon in texts has plunged by 47 per cent over the past two decades. I would be more surprised if the Pope turned out to be Catholic. These days, students struggle with commas and apostrophes. How can the poor milquetoasts be expected to grasp the finer usages of semicolons? This is all a terrible shame. Good punctuation is a balm for

Sunday

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Help! I’m trapped in a hi-tech hotel

Raffles Doha is one of the world’s weirdest, most improbable buildings. That’s it in the picture – a five-star hotel incorporated in one prong of the incomplete circle that is the 40-storey Katara Towers in Lusail City (the Fairmont Doha is in the other prong), on land reclaimed from both desert and sea. It’s an architect’s/despot’s fantasy turned reality. The bonkers design is meant to echo Qatar’s national emblem of crossed scimitars, and I’d love to see the back of the envelope upon which it was first sketched. It’s far, far beyond my miserable hack’s pay grade, but invited as a guest I’m ashamed to say that I couldn’t resist. The tone was set

Saturday

Alec Marsh

The overlooked brilliance of BBC’s The Hour

With reluctance – but enticed by its surprisingly starry cast and the fact that it had landed, ironically enough, on Netflix – I recently tuned in to The Hour, the BBC’s 2011 political drama series. It’s about a BBC TV news programme being launched in 1956, against the backdrop of the Suez Crisis. And, goodness me, isn’t it good? Better than good, in fact – it’s a high-carat television diamond, and not some lab-grown job either, but the real, romantic, sparkling deal hewn out of the earth and hawked via Antwerp before ending up in the Imperial State Crown. From the get-go – those classy, Hitchcockesque credits – you know

Friday

Penworthy

Bets for Newbury and York

The form of the Virgin Bet-sponsored Scottish Sprint Cup at Musselburgh last month is rock solid. The winner, American Affair, and the runner-up, Jm Jungle, filled the same two places in a hotter race at York yesterday off their revised marks. Fifth at Musselburgh after being backed into 2-1 favourite was COVER UP trained by the father and son team of Simon and Ed Crisford. The five-year-old gelding was beaten less than three lengths but I am pretty sure he is better than that. The horse can be tricky at the start but tomorrow he will be in the safe hands of William Buick, who has won on him three

Zoe Strimpel

How is Germany so weird yet so dull?

When I lived in Berlin a decade ago, I was struck by the contrast between the dullness of young Germans and the incredible weirdness of everything else. Only in German could the word for ‘gums’ (Zahnfleisch) mean ‘toothflesh’. And only in fleisch-mad Germany (the word for ‘meat’ is the same as ‘flesh’, which is somehow incredibly disgusting) would people snack on raw pork, a dish known as mett. Mett, also known, rather curiously, as Hackepeter, is sometimes offered at buffets in the shape of a hedgehog (what else?) with raw onion spines. It simply doesn’t get stranger. While musing on such things, I would cycle slowly around the bizarre gigantist

Zak Asgard

The tyranny of the talkative

When I was a child, all I wanted to do was talk. In fact, it got so bad that my primary school teachers were forced to give me a ‘wriggle cushion’ – an inflatable seat designed to pacify hyper children. I’m sure there’s a diagnosis in that somewhere. And as the years went by, I became known for my loquacity. Teachers at parents’ evenings would look at my mother with compassionate eyes and say things like, ‘My, my, our Zak is quite the communicator, isn’t he?’ Translation: your son is a gabby little monster. It was only when I reached maturity that I realised over-talking is a serious affliction and

Wednesday