An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
The son of the celebrity chef Marco Pierre White, imaginatively named Marco Pierre White Jr, has been convicted of theft and sentenced to 41 weeks in prison. The former heroin addict briefly became a reality star after a stint on Celebrity Big Brother, but has since reverted to bad behaviour, being imprisoned in 2018 for stealing
‘Melt your heart,’ said Simone, the Kiwi sleep therapist, stretching her generous body as elegantly as she was able on the yoga mat. Waves lapped the beach nearby. ‘Glow it violet, then allow the violet to flow up, up, up into your chest, your belly, now your legs and arms…’ Well, I tried, honestly I
Like a lot of people who didn’t know him, I felt sad hearing of the death of Michael Mosley on the Greek island of Symi, being familiar with him as a doctor whose pleasant voice I often heard on the radio. He had the gift of giving advice without being patronising or preachy. Mosley seemed
When I was growing up, regional accents were quite firmly delineated. If you came from Birmingham, for example, you spoke Brummie. That is, unless you were posh. In which case, wherever you lived, you spoke the same BBC English – or received pronunciation. Speaking ‘correctly’ was a determiner of class, like a grounding in Latin.
In these febrile times, there is one place to take refuge and that is in the Lakeland catalogue. Change and decay in all around I see, as John Henry Newman observed, but at Lakeland there is still a universe where you can conquer the perennial problem of taking the tops off strawberries, so tricky if
As any child of the 1980s could tell you, whether your house had a Sky dish had nothing to do with income. The launch of BSkyB in 1989 – when Rishi Sunak was eight and I was 10 – was greeted with horror by our middle-class professional parents, just as with their parent’s generation when
Patriotic racegoers will be hoping the King and Queen are winning owners at next week’s prestigious Royal Ascot meeting. A year ago, the William Haggas-trained Desert Hero duly obliged in the royal colours and the same horse will be among their runners next week too. However, the royal couple could have one of their string
Snooker is just the latest sport to succumb to the eye-watering sums of money on offer from authoritarian regimes. Saudi Arabia will host its first ranking event in August, with a £2 million prize fund – the highest of any tournament outside the World Championship. It follows the Riyadh Season World Masters of Snooker, held
I had always been interested in politics but had not done anything practical until the rise of Nigel Farage’s Ukip. He was proving a thorn in the side of David Cameron in 2013, which attracted my admiring attention, so I decided to try and get involved. Despite having done my bit for European unity by
I tend to steer clear of large group meals but the last time I went there was a very awkward moment. When the bill arrived, I saw two individuals tapping away on a calculator app before announcing the exact amount of money they were prepared to put on the table. ‘I didn’t have a starter,’
The oldest and best chophouse in London was Simpson’s Tavern in Ball Court Alley off Cornhill (since 1757 on that site): Charles Dickens’s favourite chophouse, and mine. Simpson’s was locked out by landlords who impersonate cartoon villains at the end of 2022 for failing to pay pandemic arrears promptly. Simpson’s said they survived world wars,
I have a complicated relationship with elderflower cordial. I love taking ingredients that have short seasons, preserving and squirrelling them away for future enjoyment. And I’m cheap, so the fact that the main component comes from the hedgerow is appealing. And it’s fun! It is a little like making a potion, dunking whole heads of
The Pac-Man defence, as all high-flying financiers know, is a tactic borrowed from the enjoyably addictive computer game which means that if you feel you are under attack then you fight back even harder to scare the crap out of your enemies. It seems that in Abu Dhabi and at the Etihad the poor beleaguered
Living off the beaten track was idyllic until one night last November. At 1 a.m. during a particularly heavy downpour, a group of hooded men came onto our property and tried to burgle us. Lulled into a false sense of security after three months in our rural home, we’d casually left our 25-year-old Land Rover Defender
With Britain so sluggish, Keir Starmer and the Labour party should want to reenergise the country. Indeed, they are preoccupied with energy, and not just the dire state of the British electrical grid but energy drinks. Labour is set to propose a ban on the sale of energy drinks to under-16s. Most British supermarkets have
You approach the pier at Clacton-on-Sea by passing under an elegant bridge, one which in Venice you would probably stop to admire. But this is Essex and the stonework is emblazoned with the town’s coat of arms and motto, Lux, salubritas et felicitas – light, health and happiness. Here you can admire the turning blades
On reading that the Maldives are to ban Israeli passport holders from entry as an alleged protest over the war in Gaza, I hooted with laughter. That dump – I wouldn’t go there if you paid me, – which is exactly what happened in 1995, when the Sunday Times sent me abroad for the very
Fiona Harvey appears to be having the time of her life. She’s the ‘real Martha’ in the Netflix hit, Baby Reindeer, where she’s depicted as a convicted stalker with a rage problem. Denying almost everything, Harvey is suing Netflix for libel on a global scale, hoping to secure a tidy £133 million. Since the show
Last year, we got rid of our television. Pretty much, anyway: it lives in the attic of our increasingly cramped two-bedroom maisonette. The TV only comes down for mummy and daddy’s Friday night date nights and for occasional family film time. Any time gained by putting the television on was almost invariably lost (and then
At 5 a.m. one morning in December, I found myself cycling as fast as I could to the bakery I worked at in Clapham, trying to get keep the blood pumping. My fingers felt like frozen gherkins, which made using the brakes difficult. Shivering and exhausted, I asked myself: what am I doing? At work,
Keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman once described progressive rock as the ‘porn of the music industry; you bought an album under the counter in a brown paper bag’. He was no doubt referring to the genre’s mid-1970s nadir when punk burst onto the scene and nicked all the cool kids, leaving the nerds to their embarrassing flares
‘You’re what?’ ‘What do you do?’ ‘Why do they need one of those?’ These are some of the questions I was asked when I first became the chaplain of Scunthorpe United Football Club in 2002, a position I’ve held ever since. At that time, there were fewer than one hundred sports chaplains across the United Kingdom, mainly
As a keen follower of most sports, I like it when the ‘good guys’ do well. By the ‘good guys’, I mean the elite sportsmen (and women) who are humble about their achievements and who you feel you could enjoy a couple of pints with at the bar of your local pub. In racing, I
I recently had an encounter with Oliver Cromwell’s hat which, these days, rests on a bespoke hat-rest in the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon. It’s an astonishing piece of craftsmanship being far wider than any normal hat at nearly three feet across. The perfectly horizontal brim is constructed from thick black felt and the central head-holding
Over the last decade, I have offered legal advice to thousands of students accused of cheating in their assessments. In university jargon, the term for cheating is ‘academic misconduct’. Although many assessments remain online after Covid, some have returned to the exam hall. There are still instances, therefore, of cheating à l’ancienne, with students writing
Another day closer to the general election and I’m at my daughter’s prep school in Oxfordshire. As has come to be the norm, I’m having a ‘VAT chat’ with a fellow mother. Of course, we’ve known about Labour’s plan for months. It will lead to a likely 20 per cent rise in private-school fees. Recently,
There was a wonderful old boy called John – Sir John – Wordie, who was a quintessential member of the establishment. A barrister, he spent much of his time defusing controversies before they had boiled over. In that enterprise, he never sought publicity, finding it much easier to dispense wise advice if no one knew
‘London has become a jungle, right? Anyone with anything nice risks having it taken.’ Bobby, the manager of one of Hatton Garden’s watch shops, does business in a windowless room as far from the street as possible, watched over by a thickset guard and a couple security cameras. ‘I’m a paranoid person,’ he says, and
In the past I would have been interested in crafting plausible excuses for unforgivable social behaviour such as failing to turn up to events to which you had RSVP’d, missing a netjet or having said something genuinely appalling. One example: circa 1999, the late Rt Hon Alan Clark MP wrote to Dear Mary. He asked
