An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Summer is now officially over and who laments its passing? Some may rhapsodise about the period between June and September, but for many of us, it is a hiatus and trial, the period of the year we most dread. It’s the bill for autumn and winter, the season we’d live better without. The pavements
Before the accusations of being a Bad Feminist start, can I say that I am inclined to believe the women who claim to have been sexually assaulted and raped by Russell Brand. Nevertheless, I found another of the complaints about him featured in the Dispatches documentary – that sexual partners would telephone Brand’s employees ‘in
In case you were under the apprehension that ‘Karen’ is simply an attractive name popularly given to girl babies in the early 1960s (my best friend as a child was called Karen, and there were three more in our year at my sink-school comprehensive) I’ve got news for you. To quote dictionary.com: Karen is a
On one of summer’s rare dry days, I spent an evening watching The Rakes Progress at Glyndebourne’s Festival Opera. I’m a big opera fan and have travelled to Italy, Spain and Germany to see some fantastic performances but had never felt the urge to go to Glyndebourne. I am not sure why. I guess the idea of all
Hinduism is diverse. Every region, caste and devotee worships differently which means that when there’s a big event no one knows what to do. Practices vary between communities. Sindhis do things differently to, say, Sikkimese. And they vary across different regions too. Sindhis in the Indian city of Pune, where my grandparents were from, do things
I was a teenage shoplifter. I had a good run at it, from 12 to 14, and found it as addictive as any drug: the anticipation, the antsiness, the sharp stab of joy on completion. But all it took was getting caught, spending an hour in a police cell before being grimly collected and yelled
It started as a fairly pleasant train journey. A woman with a half-shaved head and multiple tattoos got on pulling a French bulldog on a lead. We got to talking about dogs, and breeds, and whether Staffordshire Bull Terriers had an unearned bad reputation, and about her cats too, and was she a dog or
It doesn’t seem like 13 years since I strolled down to the Cabinet Office after work on a May evening to enjoy a bit of protest tourism. A largeish crowd of the usual malcontents – students, crusties and the Socialist Workers’ party – had gathered to harangue the Tory and Lib Dem representatives who were
Not since the then-couple Johnny Depp and Amber Heard released a pained, hostage-style video in 2016 apologising for bringing their dogs into Australia illegally has there been such an awkward public statement by A-list stars. Now is the turn of actors Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher over the weekend. In the minute-long video, they half-apologise
I first became aware of the London Sperm Bank after seeing an advert on Instagram. ‘Help someone achieve their dream of a family. Become a sperm donor and get compensated up to £420 a month’. Why not get paid to do something that I was going to do anyway in my spare time? In the
The cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason recently expressed a preference for ‘folk tunes’ at the Last Night of the Proms over the singing of Rule Britannia! – and, whatever one may think of jettisoning Thomas Arne’s celebrated anthem of British liberty, Kanneh-Mason’s suggestion raises the question of what exactly English folk music is. England is not the
As a travel writer, I used to joke about the so-called ‘downsides of the job’. The stupidly complex shower-fixture in the five-star Maldivian Paradise. The unexpected commission to go to Denmark in winter. The vague but real sting of disappointment upon realising that the free hotel pillow-chocolate is actually a mint. But in recent years
Microdosing, the practice of taking a very small amount of a mood-enhancing drug, has been happening in America for a long time. But in the UK, microdosing was, until recently, a fringe activity. Now everyone – teachers, techies, lawyers, hedge fund managers and hipsters – is doing it. Microdosing is moderation in pursuit of moderation.
This month’s dose of trivia and anecdote sees a Yorkshireman insulting an England cricketer, the young Beyoncé training her voice in an unusual way, and Keith Floyd taking revenge on a table of diners who’d made one of his waitresses cry… All three female Prime Ministers of the UK have had the same initials, albeit
The French, according to the enshrined belief system that I grew up with, are work-shy layabouts. They never turn up for a job on time as they’re too busy drinking wine for breakfast. And once they do finally start, they break off almost immediately for a two-hour lunch with more wine before dithering about a
When I was a young woman in the 1980s, videotape was the new-fangled entertainment form; on evenings in, my second husband and I liked nothing better than to whack in a VHS and record something off the the telly. We felt like we were in The Jetsons – though seen with a modern eye, we
I wish I could be like actors and pretend to be bored by press junkets, but the truth is I love the attention. My job as a Hollywood writer and producer mainly involves sitting in front of a computer and shouting at my kids, so free drinks, launch parties and people telling you how great
It’s generally not hard to find a thoroughly depressing, joyless, plaintive, whiny, doom-laden, monotoned, earnest, life-sucking, soul-less, uninspiring, hapless and gloom-inducing article in the leftier British press. In fact, I sometimes wonder if the editors have sacked all their journalists, installed ChatGPT, and simply sit there, sipping Waitrose crémant, as they punch in evermore negative and melancholy prompts like ‘write an article
If you were born after 1970 and don’t remember punk, you’ve almost certainly been misled by people who do. You’ve probably been told – through countless paean-to-punk retrospectives, documentaries and newspaper culture pages – that it was a glorious, anarchic revolution that swept all before it. I can tell you first-hand that it wasn’t. Punk
Robbie Robertson, the revered songwriter who died last week aged 80, was an immensely important composer. Over six decades in the entertainment business, Robertson worked alongside a small galaxy of musicians and singers, most famously Bob Dylan, who probably spoke for many when he said the Toronto-born artist’s death came as ‘shocking news’ for those
‘It’s like the Olympics of performing’ says Los Angeles-based comedian Greta Titelman on the Fringe’s reputation over the pond. ‘It’s a big honour – but you will likely have a mental breakdown at some point during your run.’ Like over 350 US-based acts this year, Greta has opted to spend August in Scotland’s capital at the largest
An impossible 45 years ago, I decided the moment had come to get back on my pushbike. I had long hated the way the motor car was taking over the world and wanted to play my part in changing this. I also had a more selfish reason. After two years on the Fleet Street diet
It’s not just bears that squat in the woods, as you’ll discover if you ever have the pleasure of a visit from wild campers. Other disfigurements to the land have included scorched patches of grass, which luckily didn’t become full-blown wildfires, branches severed from trees (presumably for wet firewood), stakes removed from young saplings (ditto),
Let’s play a game of word association. I’ll start: ‘skinhead’. Hmm. I think I can guess which words instantly occurred to you: ‘thug’ perhaps, ‘hooligan’ probably and possibly even ‘racist’? Yet for anyone who remembers the original incarnation of skinheads, another word will always spring to mind: ‘reggae’. If you believe that Britain’s love affair with
Our monthly trivia round-up started with July, named after Julius Caesar – now we reach the segment of the year named after the emperor Augustus. It’s the month with the shortest war in history, the theft of the Mona Lisa, and the execution of William Wallace. You won’t believe what happened to his left leg…
Dordogne, France Down here in southwest France, the ripple effect of the war in Ukraine has become oddly visible. Normally the fields around our house are planted with sunflowers and maize – but not this year. Wheat and barley stretch to the horizon. As you drive around, the roadside fields all bear witness to the
It started with That Song on the World Service in the early hours, the one I’ve always loathed; for me it symbolises the start of the state we’re in now whereby perfectly good toe-tappers are routinely strung out in slo-mo by interpreters for whom misery passes as creativity. OK, the Prince original wasn’t exactly a
It must have been late 1993. She was at the height of her fame and I was in the earliest days of my journalism career. I was working for a small press agency in Clerkenwell whose stock in trade was day work for newspapers: court cases, press conferences and particularly door knocks and door steps. As
For the past week Hollywood’s film and television actors have been on strike, plunging Los Angeles’s most famous industry into chaos. Performers joined screenwriters (who have been striking since May) on the picket line after talks broke down in what has become the first simultaneous strike in more than 60 years. The strikes have attracted plenty
