An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Tomorrow’s Randox Grand National (4 p.m.), the world’s most famous horse race, is the highlight of an excellent card at Aintree and I think the bookies have got it right with the horses they have put at the top of the market. Stumptown, who could yet go off as favourite, is the best weighted horse
Dubai-style chocolate, viral star of TikTok and Instagram, is so popular that Waitrose is limiting sales to two bars per customer. The upmarket supermarket chain has taken the move, the Times reports, ‘because we want everyone to have the chance to enjoy this delicious chocolate’. Some are sceptical. Steve Dresser, who heads up consultancy Grocery
At last, somebody has said it. Busking is akin to psychological torture, especially for those who have to live or work within earshot. This damning comparison came from no less than a judge at the City of London magistrates’ court, following a suit brought by Global Radio, the Leicester Square-based owner of LBC and Classic
It’s cherry blossom season in Japan and about half the population (according to a Kansai University study) will gather at the viewing spots to pose for photos (Japanese Instagram may collapse) and enjoy picnics in the shade of the sakura trees. Japan will also welcome close to four million visitors to witness the floral marvel.
I’ve always thought working in hospitality is like getting a free MBA – but one rooted in the real world rather than theory. So it didn’t surprise me to discover a brilliant business idea in a book about the restaurant trade. In Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect, star
West Virginia. There is a paradox. A state of natural beauty, glorified by mountains and watered by rivers – including the Shenandoah (surely the most beautiful word in American) – carved out of reluctant nature by hard human labour, then divided by slavery and war, but ending on the Union side – it ought to
The Italians have a phrase: ‘brutti ma buoni’. It means ‘ugly but beautiful’, and it’s the name they give to their nubbly hazelnut meringue biscuits, which – as the name suggests – taste lovely but aren’t lookers. The phrase came to me the other day when I lifted the lid on my pan of golden
The moment I stepped out of the Covent Garden sunshine and into the regal offices of the Lady magazine, it was like stepping into a 19th-century Tardis, and I was already in love. ‘I’m going for the editorship hell for leather,’ I wrote in my diary (published in 2010). ‘I’ve even been out and bought
It wasn’t until I received a notification from the Monzo app that I realised I’d spent nearly £10 on two coffees. This wasn’t in the Wolseley or even within the M25, but in Two Magpies, a café in Holt, our local market town in Norfolk – for two regular lattes (admittedly with an extra shot,
My home city of Oxford has been ravaged by shop closures over the past decade but there is still one outstanding second-hand bookshop (the estimable antiquarian department at Blackwell’s apart) and it’s the Oxfam bookshop on St Giles. Thanks to a regular donations from dons and writers, there are invariably high-quality and interesting items on
Let me tell you a ghost story. I began texting Becky two weeks ago. Soon the messages were flowing. A date was set, a table booked. Friday night. Soho. Here we go. Then, a day before the date, the texts stopped and the lady vanished – leaving me to cancel the restaurant and spend the
We British are not famed for culinary daring. An adventurous meal has traditionally been one that lacks potatoes. Nose-to-tail eating is mostly anathema to a nation that prefers the blandest part of the chicken because it’s the easiest to cut up. Poverty and shortage were not enough to spur our creativity during postwar rationing. The
Women’s expectations are off. They want men with advanced degrees, but on university campuses, women outnumber their male counterparts. They want men with above-average incomes, but the gender pay gap has been reversed – young women now out-earn men. They want men who share their politics, but in almost every western country over the past decade or so, women
Once at my old local paper, the Grimsby Evening Telegraph, a trainee made the mistake of sniggering when asked to cover the allotments sub-committee. ‘Don’t ever fuck with allotment holders,’ the news editor warned. ‘It may not matter to you, but they take those little patches of land very seriously indeed.’ Like most of the
The French claim authorship of April Fools’ Day, dating it to the late Middle Ages. Back then, those who celebrated the year’s beginning on 1 January under the new Julian Calendar made fun of those who still went by the old one. A paper fish was attached to the unsuspecting backs of Gregorian diehards and
How do you walk away from greatness? How do you vacate the position of being literally the best person in the world at something? Most of us never have to face this challenge, but at some point Ronnie O’Sullivan will. In Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry he has contrasting examples of how to tackle it.
Let’s say you’re a young woman working in London, and you own a one-bedroom flat in Islington. You fall in love with a chap who has a nice house in Devon. You marry him. As soon as you do that, you’ll no longer be allowed to park your car outside your Islington flat in the
It is the evening of Monday 23 September 1985. A band called the June Brides are playing a free gig in the bar of Manchester Polytechnic’s Students Union, the Mandela Building (of course) on Oxford Road. I find myself among the audience of freshers’ week first-year undergraduates. I am 18, a small-town boy who’s been
I like to think of myself as good at making friends. I tend to rank them. There are kindred spirits (rare), very good friends (perhaps five at the most), and good (ten or more). Friendships, like plants, need looking after; they require time and attention. One rank below friends are acquaintances. Acquaintances add warmth and
A small but perfectly formed training outfit from Gloucestershire has quietly been making ripples, bordering on waves, with its horses in recent weeks – and there is plenty to look forward to for the rest of the season too. David Killahena and Graeme McPherson, who hold a joint licence to train at Stow-on-the Wold, sent
‘You need to get yourself tested’, my wife said after yet another of my lapses, ‘you’re fast becoming a marble-free zone.’ I couldn’t disagree. Perhaps the relentless ‘mental ’elf’ craze had alerted me to my own flaws, though groping for names and words is, surely, excusable by 67. But I would often devour a book
Have you ever looked after a child that doesn’t nap from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m.? I have. Just to be clear, I’m talking about a 14-hour day with no relief whatsoever from grannies, nannies or DHs, the ghastly acronym that Mumsnet uses for fathers to signify ‘darling husband’. Next question: have you ever looked
The River Cafe has grown a thrifty annexe, and this passes for democratisation. All restaurants are tribal: if dukes have Wiltons, ancient Blairites have the River Cafe. It is a Richard Rogers remake of Duckhams oil storage, a warehouse of sinister London brick, and a Ruth Rogers restaurant. Opening in 1987, it heralded the gentrification
Is nothing sacred? Not quite, as it turns out. There remains one last object of piety in these, the early days of the third Christian millennium (don’t laugh). Surprisingly, it is a fictional bear from darkest Peru. Yes, Paddington is back in the news. Because he hath been desecrated. There is, or was, a sedentary
Waking up to hear the ‘unprecedented’ news about Heathrow Airport, I felt a nanosecond of luxurious relaxation (albeit I’m not exactly over the moon about being in a hospital bed without the use of my legs). Of course I’d rather be scampering about an airport superstore being sprayed with scent by sexy shop-girls rather than
How’s this for a bargain? A Pizza Express margherita for only 33p, if you dine in and order between 5 and 6 p.m. tomorrow, to celebrate 60 years of the chain. ‘In 1965 we brought proper pizza to the UK, and what better way to mark those 60 years than with 60 minutes of our
I’ve been to a few underwhelming Unesco World Heritage Sites. Take the Struve Geodetic Arc, which curves almost invisibly across Eastern Europe. I visited without even realising. As for the Fray Bentos corned beef factory, in Uruguay, I’m writing this about 20 minutes from the Fray Bentos corned beef factory and I’m still reluctant to
The wigs are being dusted off, the spandex jumpsuits laundered and the amps turned up, not to 11 but to infinity. Rock legends Spinal Tap, one of the world’s loudest bands, are back with a sequel to their seminal 1984 mockumentary, to be released on 12 September. But can Spinal Tap 2: The End Continues
The Carnegies are a long-running award for children’s writing and illustration, established by the Library Association in honour of Scottish philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and first awarded in 1936 to Arthur Ransome’s Pigeon Post. This year’s shortlist of 16 for fiction and illustration, chosen by a dozen librarians, is out now and billed thus: ‘Marginalised Male