Uncategorized

Wednesday

James Innes-Smith

I’m an unlikely golf convert

Golf has always felt like the embarrassing uncle of the sporting world, from those garish check slacks and snobby clubhouse rules to the desperate middle-managers sucking up to the boss at the 18th hole. Like many non-golfers I could never understand the appeal. Surely only a masochist would find pleasure whacking tiny balls into tiny holes. For me, real sport involved sweaty blokes dashing round a playing field injuring each other. Golf had neither sweat nor injury unless you count a nasty chill from standing out in the rain all day. Tiger Woods may have briefly sexed-up the game back in the 2000s but it was never really considered cool to

Lucy Holden

On the hunt for wild haggis

The haggis: Scotland’s most elusive wild animal, one that can jump six feet in the air and goes straight for the throat, according to the hunters that track the bat-faced, Peter Stringfellow-haired beasts ahead of Burns night. ‘Is that a haggis!?’ I screech at my guide. ‘No, that’s a dog,’ he says, adding that this is going to be a long walk. A year into my Scottish residency and having had an extremely unsuccessful Burns night in Glasgow during my first month here (a date with a Scot more interested in watching himself on YouTube than finding me any kind of haggis supper) I’ve decided to come straight to the

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

This wine writer needed a detox

I’m just back from a week in Austria and feel on top of the world. Well, if not at the actual summit, maybe about two thirds up. After a lousy year made worse by a Covid Christmas, I was deep in Gloomstown, eating like a pig and drinking like a fish. At almost 64, I was a stone and half overweight and drowning in booze, clocking up an alarming 120 units during one festive week. I’ve never felt so sluggish nor so miserable. Something had to be done.  Matron said the food in our mouths had to be a complete puree before we could swallow And so, invited to road test

Tuesday

John Sturgis

Sven-Goran Eriksson made English football

The former England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson has terminal cancer, he says he expects to be dead before the year is out. In an age when such grim diagnoses are usually kept private until their morbid predictions have come to pass, it was characteristically candid of the 75-year-old Swede to go public like this, even though doing so inevitably invited a fresh round of media scrutiny of a life that has already been scrutinised intensively over many years.  He treated players as grown-ups, even though they often weren’t Any England football manager gets attention – it comes with the territory. But when you start having public relationships with a flamboyant

Paul Burke

The strange psychology of dog owners

I’m writing this in a coffee shop. I write most things in coffee shops but I’ve never been to this one before. As I paid for my latte, I noticed the sign (below). Never mind Brexit or Palestine, I can’t think of an issue that will divide the nation like this will. People will immediately take sides and, like Brexit or Palestine, I think we all know which side will be the more voluble. And it won’t be the side who sigh with relief and think, ‘at last!’ The British are famously a nation of dog lovers but has that love has gone a little too far? The Pope certainly

Linden Kemkaran

Should you buy a vineyard?

Sometimes you only realise a trend is happening when you inadvertently become a part of it. Last summer we moved house within the southeast from town to country, having deliberately sought out a property with land that would be suitable for planting a small vineyard. A lot of the big English wineries like Chapel Down procure good quality grapes from nearby growers We’ve since discovered that we are far from alone. So many others have had the same idea that most estate agents now employ a ‘vineyard specialist’ who can spot potential and match would-be viticulturists – people who cultivate and harvest grapes – with their future vineyard. The enthusiasm

Monday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The rise of the sham actors

We’re all wise to those phoney rotters who hold ‘luxury beliefs’ – the excellent phrase coined by the social commentator Rob Henderson in 2019 to describe ‘the modern trend among affluent Americans to use their beliefs as a way to display their social status… a belief held or espoused in order to signal that a person belongs to an elite class’. I’ve recently noticed a new side-effect of extreme privilege; luxury self-deprecation, as seen principally in actors who diss their own vehicles (if old) or express dismay at becoming famous (if young). I call them the Slamming Hams – Shams for short. These star-turncoats are headed by Hugh Grant, who

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Why do so many writers become dictators?

The list of writer-politicians goes back as far as Julius Caesar, who wrote a robust account of his campaigns. More recently, Boris Johnson has published fiction, as has former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, although neither to much acclaim. Inevitably, the names on this list tend to be either minor politicians or minor writers. Often both.  In fact, if you’re in search of a major literary figure, who also made a significant contribution to the politics of their country, and even rose to be a ruler in their own right, there’s only one answer. That is the Italian author, soldier, womaniser, coke-addict and career egomaniac, Gabriele d’Annunzio, who briefly became dictator

James Jeffrey

I envy the hippies of Finisterre

I can’t stop thinking about Pierre. I first met him at the end of December in a Finisterre bar much favoured by the hippy types drawn to the strange energies of the western coast of Galicia. With his sunned and bearded swarthy face, solid build and tattoos, I initially thought he was a Galician fisherman. But when I dropped a napkin on the floor and he swooped to pick it up for me, I was struck by this conscientious and unexpected behaviour. I’ve noticed a correlation between missing the odd tooth, having a weathered face and being open and warm-hearted The next day I ran into him at a bar

Friday

Penworthy

Ante-post bets on both sides of the Irish Sea

With tomorrow’s cards at Ascot and Haydock both victims of the cold snap, and Lingfield’s Sunday meeting under threat, it makes sense to look ahead with some ante-post bets, for once on both sides of the Irish Sea. I like to back horses in the Randox Grand National a long way ahead of the race in order to get the best odds It’s not often that I gamble on races in Ireland but I like the look of JETARA at double figure odds in the Nathaniel Lacy & Partners Solicitors Novice Hurdle at the Dublin Racing Festival on 3 February. This race at Leopardstown is highly likely to be dominated by