An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
It’s 1 a.m. in our small cathedral city and car horns are honking in jubilation. From down the street comes the sound of smashing bottles, and a deep bellowing roar, growing louder as the ‘whooahs’ and the chants echo off Georgian terraces. Well, it’s a country town on a Saturday night; a certain amount of
I have been fond of vests ever since those plain white cotton ones we wore for primary school athletics in the long ago and mythically hot summers of the mid-1970s. No other garment in the male warm weather wardrobe is quite the same. A T-shirt isn’t as breathable, while a loose linen shirt even half
As an urban-dwelling, free-spirited 41-year-old with sleep issues and a whimsical trade – writing – having a baby posed many challenges. The chief of which has been having to constantly work with two other people: baby and baby-daddy. I vowed as the due date approached to get kitted up in ways that would feel reassuring, limiting the cannonball splash effect of
In 1987, when I was 19, I started at my first ‘proper’ adult job. This was as a lowly civil service clerk, or administrative officer – filing, basically. It was a post within the Lord Chancellor’s Department – as it was known then – but which today is called the Ministry of Justice, which doesn’t
Back in 1979, I took my grandmother and her friend Frances to Monty’s in Ealing. Monty’s was one of the early Indian restaurants in London. My nan was in her 90s, and it was her first curry. We ordered the usual array of dishes – the sizzling tandoori, the Bombay aloo, the dal. My nan
The Japanese singer, actor and heartthrob Matsumoto Jun, who I’ve always thought of as an Oriental David Cassidy (thus showing my age), will make his UK acting debut later this year when he appears in acclaimed playwright Hideki Noda’s very loose adaptation of the Brothers Karamazof at Sadler’s Wells. Jun is, not to sell him
I fell in love with London when I arrived here as a teenager at the start of the 1970s. Straight out of an American suburban high school, I’d dreamed of the great metropolis of Shakespeare and Dickens, and I vowed never to leave. Why would I, when, as Dr Samuel Johnson famously declared, ‘He who
It’s July 2024, and Netflix has decided we have to go back. In honour of the 20th anniversary of the pilot, all six series of Lost have been uploaded to Netflix in the US, and now younger audiences get to experience one of the biggest pop culture obsessions of the noughties for the first time.
England and their manager Gareth Southgate fell short once more, losing 2-1 to Spain in the Euro 24 final. Spain gave England a lesson in attacking football, dominating possession and controlling the match for long periods. The Spanish are the deserving champions of Europe for a record fourth time. And England? They hardly turned up,
Many previous football tournaments have had a signature motif: the Mexican wave in 1986, the irritating vuvuzelas in South Africa 2010, the firework up the backside in London in 2021. At Euro 2024, that motif has been the hurling of plastic beer glasses. They have been thrown, in celebration or anger, by the Croatians, the Serbs,
Forget the extraordinary achievements – the reason we’re going to miss James Anderson is that, as a man, he’s so ordinary. Yes, he’s played more Tests for England than anyone else (188), and taken more wickets (701 and counting, at least for another day or two). Indeed his haul is easily the best by any
Armchair sports fans are in for a treat this weekend and I am not just talking about England’s appearance in the final of Euro 2024 or the Wimbledon finals. Racing enthusiasts can look forward to watching 11 races on ITV tomorrow afternoon spread over just 170 minutes. This is so-called ‘Super Saturday’ when there is
I recently went to a conference on the impact of artificial intelligence on the wine industry. It was not immediately obvious why this would have any relevance to my life. I know nothing about AI, having decided not to bother experimenting with it after being reassured by my delightful first cousin once removed that as
The tennis is great, but an equally impressive aspect of Wimbledon is how well it has managed tradition. When I visited last week, the first time in a decade, everything was beautifully and reassuringly familiar. The clean thwack of the rackets, the running of the ball boys, the military-style precision and bearing of the ball
I am evangelical about scones as a gateway bake – they are the perfect entry point for the nervous baker. They don’t require any nonsense. Rubbing the butter and flour together by hand and stamping the dough out is straightforward; and as long as a scone is risen and golden-topped after baking, then you’re fine.
In Spain, you can eat all day – and we did. Earlier in the summer, I spent two days in Andalusia, and most of the 48 hours were taken up by mealtimes. A breakfast of the sweet porridge poleá started the day, then ham-tasting for a mid-morning snack, followed by a two-hour lunch. Spanish law
Politicians pretty well have to be gamblers. You give up a promising career in, say, dentistry, teaching or accountancy for a world in which all but a fortunate few are almost bound to end in tears. No matter how diligent and attentive a constituency MP you may be, if the national mood swings against your
Anne Hathaway’s latest film, The Idea of You, has become Amazon’s most-streamed rom com, causing me to reflect that Hollywood’s young man/older woman scenario has changed for the better since The Graduate. Though everyone was mad for it at the time, was there ever a grimmer film about relationships? We’re meant to empathise with the
Ian Chappell, the flinty Australian captain, has said that after giving cricket to the world the English did nothing further to develop the game. That original gift, it might be argued, was a fairly significant bequest, but Chappell could point to postwar history. In his lifetime, cricket has been shaped by Australians, West Indians, and
We are having a glorious July where I live in Poland. There have been pleasantly warm days. The birds are singing. The beer is cool. So, why does a sense of melancholy keep snaking around my consciousness? Well, for various reasons. I can’t claim to be the world’s most cheerful man. But one reason is
I blame Brexit. In the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, when the whole nation was still in the throes of a collective nervous breakdown, I succumbed to the prevailing mood of madness and went on a TV dating programme. No, it wasn’t Naked Attraction, the Channel 4 show in which participants strip down to reveal
I’d all but forgotten about David Cameron when he returned as foreign secretary under the last government, and the first thing I remembered about him, when he returned, was his chin. By which I mean its prim absence and how, combined with those thin lips and tiny mouth, more like a fish’s than a person’s,
The moral absolutist in me believes that in every city, with its finite number of restaurants, there is such a thing as the best of all possible lunches. I don’t have to find it, but I have to get close. Mediocre doesn’t cut it. In fact, on holiday, the idea of wasting a meal on
Last Monday, a group of 20 French rappers released a video entitled ‘No Pasarán’. Evoking the Republican resistance against Franco in the Spanish civil war and before that, the resistance of the French against the Germans during the Great War, the phrase called for people to resist Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. If last night’s
Recent research has revealed what many of us suspected: that fake meat is highly processed and contains junk such as exotic emulsifiers, stabilisers, flavour enhancers and artificial colourings, all of which are designed to make them feel, taste and look like the real thing. Often, they are loaded with salt, sugar and fat. Many Britons
When I was a child I had a dream, as most kids do, of entering a toyshop and being told I could carry away with me as much as would fit in a large shopping trolley. In would go every kind of Action Man, every game of Buckaroo or Operation, and enough Star Wars figurines
Rishi Sunak devoted part of the last day of his doomed premiership to meeting Becky Holt, Britain’s most tattooed mother, on ITV’s This Morning show. Ms Holt was clad in a bikini which revealed much of the 95 per cent of her body surface that is covered in tattoos. After the brief encounter, she told
Sexy time at the cinema is becoming a thing of the past. That’s according to research on the prevalence of vices in top live-action films from film maven Stephen Follows. His study shows that drug taking and violence are as popular on screen as ever in the 21st century. Profanity has dipped only slightly, but
There cannot be a lazier way of travelling across Canada than in the Rocky Mountaineer. There are luxury trains, and then there’s this. For two days, I sat in a sumptuously upholstered, air-conditioned carriage, looking out at the vast wilderness of Canada’s interior, as waiters plied me with wine, chocolates and three-course meals. When imagining