An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Field sex is, I believe, an experience that unites those from all walks of life. Whether it was a drunken fumble, a discreet teenage quickie hidden from your parents or a planned act to inject some spice into your waning marriage, plenty of us have felt the vulnerability of walking to the car with a
Our tour of the trivia behind London’s postcode areas has reached SE, where we find rock stars being embalmed, P.G. Wodehouse reporting on cricket and Westminster Bridge being painted green for a very specific reason. Oh, and Winston Churchill gets a hat-trick of mentions…
The hashtag ‘gym creep’ now has more than 37.3 million views on TikTok. Honestly, I’ve watched hundreds of these videos and the only weird behaviour I can spot in any of the clips is from the women recording the unsuspecting men while they work out. ‘Watch this creep,’ the lady will say as a confused
Reading that Madonna has decided to cancel the film about her life that she has been working on for the past two years, I felt a pang of sorrow. The biopic sounded like the biggest vanity project ever attempted – and thus promised to be an excellent ‘mock-watch’, as I’ve named the cinematic equivalent of
I simply love being sober. Isn’t it fun? Being totally level-headed throughout the day. Why would you want a glass of red when you can substitute some cranberry juice? January is just the perfect time to give up all of your vices because you get to hear, collectively, how great everybody feels. How much more
Who does not love a snowdrop? The pure white of their pendulous petals may be chilly, but who cares when they flower in the chilliest months, often on their own, or accompanied only by hellebores and aconites. I grow a number of snowdrop species and cultivated varieties, as well as unnamed seedlings that seem to
The HR department has killed day-to-day divadom. No longer can you tell your co-worker that her hair needs a good brush; nor can you explain to Richard from accounts that his tan brogues and shiny blue suit sting your retinas. That might upset them. People would be a lot more presentable if you could say
Everyone has their own most loved and hated months. While for Chaucer, Browning and others April was a time of joyful rebirth, it was of course for Eliot ‘the cruellest month’. Still, February tends to get a bad rap from everybody. It manages to be both the shortest and longest month of the year. In
The letter was polite but to the point. The PR firm where I’d applied for a job thanked me for my time but told me I hadn’t been successful. The position was going to someone else. Ouch. This wasn’t the first time I’d been rejected, of course – and it certainly wasn’t the last. I’ve
What a year it’s been for sex on TV. As we emerge blinking from the annual glut of televisual entertainment, I can’t get over how far we’ve come. Bridgerton, Babylon Berlin, Lady Chatterley… everybody’s at it, with no period in history so tragic that a few cheap thrills can’t be extracted from it. If you’d
On a recent Sunday evening, the Shaftesbury Theatre in Soho was packed to the gills with a crowd celebrating a dramatic tribute to a landlord: the best kind of landlord, the landlord of a pub. And not just any old pub, but the pub he ruled with an iron fist for 63 years until his retirement
Two and a half years ago, I wrote a column about how I’d started sleeping in my garden office. No, not because Caroline had kicked me out of the master bedroom, but because we were having the house rewired and the builders needed us to vacate our room at seven o’clock every morning. The move
To understand Bob Dylan’s Fragments – Time Out Of Mind Sessions (1996-1997) – due to be released on Friday – you have to go back half a century to the release of the Beatles’s Let It Be. As millions of fans around the world bought the band’s final album, Paul McCartney was horrified. This was
Only a mother could love a nepo baby – but there are some professions in which the far reach of the dead hand of nepotism strikes me as worse than others. In such frothy fields as modelling and television presenting, the prettiest face will still usually win out: look at Maya Jama, the new compere
He was one of the most unlikely pop stars this country has ever produced: extraordinarily badly dressed and famously contrarian, with a voice that sounded more like an angry man shouting than anything recognisable as singing. But Mark E. Smith, front man of the Fall, became one of the most recognisable and eventually revered figures
When I was a philosophy student at King’s College London in my early twenties, I came across a book called Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee. A history of western philosophy told through the story of the author’s relationship with it, it opens with a three- or four-year old Magee trying to catch himself
Gina Lollobrigida, who died this week at the age of 95, was known in the 1950s and thereafter for the kind of beauty which drove Italian men to self-destruction; and for performances in films which seemed to define a scrappy, energetic, self-possessed Italian womanhood. During her career, ‘La Lollo’ sculpted, took photographs, did a little journalism
The results are in and nature (i.e. God) wins again. A Bureau of Labour Statistics survey in the US has found that lumberjacks and farmers are the happiest, least stressed and most fulfilled workers, further proving that everything we need to be joyful and satisfied in this life is not man-made. Nor does it have
‘Pitiful.’ That’s the verdict of Damian Green MP, acting chair of the digital, culture, media and sport committee, on the payouts that streaming companies such as Spotify and Apple Music provide to musicians. An update to the group’s Economics of Music Streaming report, published on Friday, calls on the government to take a ‘proactive strategic
One initially overlooked aspect of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s ill-fated mini-Budget was the plan to restore VAT-free shopping for tourists. The scheme, which allowed non-EU visitors to claim back 20 per cent on their purchases, was scrapped in 2020 by then chancellor Rishi Sunak but looked set for a comeback. This was excellent news
Are you suffering from SMS? Smart meter stress, that is. When we decided recently to accept our energy provider’s offer to install a smart meter, I had no clue how anxiety-inducing the digital display on the little black monitor could be. Smart meters tell us (and our suppliers) how much energy we’re using, minute by minute. In theory they make life easier,
As a millennial who spends a lot of time on social media, I assumed I was desensitised to adverts. I thought I was ad-blind, until I started being bombarded with posts asking me to donate my eggs. It was a post from the London Egg Bank which first caught my eye, offering a ‘freeze and
If you read only the title of Charlie Taverner’s book Street Food you could be forgiven for assuming it was an exploration of the stalls that line the trendier streets of our cities, offering bibimbap and bao, jerk chicken and jian bing. But the author’s focus predates brightly coloured gazebo hoardings and polystyrene packaging and
As I digest the news that Kiwi are ceasing the sale of its shoe polish in the UK, due to plummeting demand in the age of trainers, I find myself in mourning chiefly for the tin. What will the ritual of shoe-polishing feel like when it no longer starts with the thumb-against-index-finger rub of the
This month our trivia-inspired tour of London’s postcode areas reaches NW, where Tim Burton snored, Madness caused an earthquake and Desmond Tutu asked policemen for directions even though he knew where he was going…
The anticipation surrounding the release of a certain memoir today obscures a bigger question about the changing face of our publishing industry. Why does every Tom, Dick and Prince Harry think they can write a book these days? Figures last week showed the number of independent bookshops in Britain reached a ten-year high in 2022,
Sibling rivalry is nothing new, as the Old Testament’s story of Cain and Abel attests. Back in 1966, director John Huston cast hellraiser Richard Harris as fratricidal bad boy Cain in The Bible: In the Beginning. Years later, Ray Winstone played Cain’s even naughtier descendent Tubal-Cain in Darren Aronofsky’s decidedly odd Noah (2014). 2009 also
Unless you’ve been living under a snowdrift – with no mobile signal – for the past six months, you’ll have heard of the kerfuffle surrounding the new generations of artificial intelligence. Especially a voluble, dutiful, inexhaustible chatbot called ChatGPT, which has gone from zero users to several million in the two wild weeks since its
‘Tears are not enough,’ ABC once sang defiantly – but these days, they’re more than enough for handsomely rewarded celebrities to assure us that they suffer like the rest of us, so please don’t hate them. Watching the BBC Breakfast presenter Sally Nugent – a 51-year-old woman – boo-hooing recently after watching a clip of
