An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Our national malaise arises in part from the poor state of many of Britain’s private services. No, not a misprint. I mean private services. Many on the political right berate public services, implying that were they only to be privatised everything would be sweetness and light. Yet modern technology now makes it all too easy
Gloom. Relentless rain out of a sullen sky enhanced an already pessimistic mood. We were talking geopolitics and agreeing that the West ought to brace itself for a hard landing. Try as we might, we could find no good news, anywhere. Where is the self-belief of the Reagan/Thatcher years? Instead, a culture war is taking
Back in November, 20 horses went to post in the Troytown Chase at Navan. Fourteen were trained in Co. Meath by Gordon Elliott, who provided the winner Coko Beach and four of the first five home. He broke no rules. To those who objected to his mass entry, Elliott retorted that he hadn’t stopped any
War has had its apologians ever since history began,From the times of the Greeks and Trojans when they sang of Arms and the Man,(But if you ask me to name the best, sir, I’ll tell you the one I mean,Head and shoulders above the rest, sir, was the War of 14-18) If you’ve never heard
Late last year, Martin Scorsese’s epic Killers of the Flower Moon switched from cinema to living room on the Apple TV streaming service. An increasingly popular tactic, the move from big to small screen draws in a whole new audience, many of whom deliberately waited to see it for the price of a monthly subscription rather than spend
No one seems to be talking about how the faces of most of the female population appear to have frozen. I increasingly find myself gazing admiringly at groups of young men – like some sort of proud avuncular patriarch – who seem the only people left capable of smiling. Like knights of old, they are protectors of
Tuesday’s statement about Prince William was terse to the point of being unhelpful. ‘The Prince of Wales has pulled out of attending the memorial service for the late King Constantine of Greece at Windsor Castle due to a personal matter.’ Granted, William has been unusually active during the past few weeks. One minute he has
It’s 7 in the morning, I’ve got to Milan Linate airport two hours before my plane to Bari, and already things are going horribly wrong. The airline aren’t letting my cats fly with me. I’ve got documents to show they’re microchipped and all their vaccines are in order, but two uniformed men, straight out of
Watching Frank Skinner perform his latest one man show at the Gielgud Theatre reminded me of what it must have been like back in the dying days of variety. By the late 1970s and early 1980s cheeky jokesters and all-round entertainers such as Tarby, Brucie, Doddy and Manning were feeling the heat from a new
Last week marked the 200th anniversary of the most significant evening in the history of palaeontology. On 20 February 1824, the learned gentlemen of the Geological Society gathered at their rooms on Bedford Street in Covent Garden for a meeting that would transform human understanding of prehistoric life. To begin, the clergyman William Conybeare announced
As someone who was fond of Derek Draper (a feeling that probably wasn’t mutual, as I nicked his bird) it was strange to see photographs of his funeral. It seemed like a state occasion for some legendary leader who had died in battle defending his country, rather than for the husband of a likeable TV
When they come to write the history of the AI revolution, there’s a good chance that the writers will devote many chapters to the early 2020s. Indeed, such is the pace, scale and wildness of the development, it is possible entire books will be devoted to, say, what happened in the last week or so.
My nemesis is a student at another university. She has not always been my nemesis. We were friends until I realised that she was not who she purported to be. Her interests had been systematically poached from the people around her. Talking to her always felt like an interrogation from a particularly insecure detective. Real
Tomorrow’s Bet Eider Handicap Chase at Newcastle is just the sort of marathon contest in which I usually like to have a bet but, with so many of the 13 runners out of form and the going likely to be very soft, I am happy to give it a miss this time around. Instead, I
Michael Gove’s restrictions on Airbnb are too late for Mousehole, the next village along. It mirrors Dull-on-Sea in The Pirates Next Door: ‘Too busy in the summer and in winter it shuts down’. Last year there was so much traffic in Mousehole that the bus couldn’t get through, and it dumped trippers at the top of
The other day I met a young woman wearing a crop top emblazoned with the words Waystar/Royco – the media conglomerate at the heart of Succession, HBO’s cult television drama about the nasty Roy family and their insane attempts at one-upmanship for control of their father’s company. It won Emmy and Golden Globe awards three
Several years ago, I went for a swim after I’d been for a job interview. I’d just finished my lengths, had my shower, and as I wrestled my knickers back on, a voice from behind me said ‘It’s Ettie, isn’t it?’ Quite how she recognised my bare bottom I don’t know, but the woman who’d interviewed me earlier in the day was
The Chelsea bun was first baked in the Bun House in Chelsea in the 18th century. It was a bakery which found particular favour with the Hanoverian royal family, as its pastries were reminiscent of those from whence they came. But these buns were for everyman: they were customarily bought by the poor on Good
The Newt is an idealised country house in Somerset which won the World’s Best Boutique Hotel award last year. It is small, beautiful and mind-meltingly expensive, even for the Bruton Triangle and its mooing art galleries. Poor Somerset! It never wanted to be monied enough to have a triangle, but the rich make their own
I love it when the England cricket team flies east in the winter. It means they’re playing in the early morning, UK time, and that’s just when I need them the most. Because cricket is a powerful antidepressant. Without the sound or sight of bat on ball, early mornings at the moment would hold their
Watching England play Wales in the Six Nations the other day, a lacklustre match between two middling sides and distinguished only by lashings of Welsh hwyl as the visitors outperformed their role as underdogs, I remarked to the Irish friend who was with me: ‘The Welsh don’t like the English, do they?’ ‘Get in line,’
In 1988, I lived on the backpackery Khaosan Road, Bangkok, in a hotel which offered heroin on room service. It went like this: in the morning, you padded down the teakwood stairs to the little kitchen and you asked the pretty Thai girl for breakfast – scrambled eggs, bacon, ‘extras’. Ten minutes later the same
My favourite home in London was a neat three-storey townhouse in Haringey right next to Wood Green. It was at a strange junction between the rough and mildly frightening Finsbury Park and the hilly Eden of Crouch End. When we needed to get the tube we walked south, past halal butchers and kebab shops –
I remember going to Westfield Shepherd’s Bush to visit my first food hall, still a relatively new concept for British diners. They’re big rooms filled with shared seating and different kitchen stalls, serving everything from Thai to burgers, wontons to bratwurst. You can have a burrito and your friend can have a pizza. Oh, how I loved
In September 2019 my fear was that comedian Shane Gillis might throw himself off a bridge. Just hours after being hired by Saturday Night Live, one of the world’s biggest TV shows, he was fired. The reason: journalist Seth Simons had posted clips of Gillis disparaging Chinese people. The clips, from 2018, showed Gillis on
Having just watched the overwhelmingly underwhelming Bob Marley: One Love, I have decided that Hollywood’s obsession with biopics must be stopped. Biopics have become so ubiquitous, so pervasive, so unoriginal, that Kingsley Ben-Adir, who plays Marley in the film, has already starred in two other biopics: The Comey Rule as Barack Obama and One Night in Miami as Malcolm X.
In the village where we used to live, the churchyard was just over the road from our cul-de-sac. I often used to potter around on my lunchbreaks, or pass through on walks. The oldest gravestone I managed to find, if I remember correctly, was for a local chap who had died in his seventies around
My favourite bit of understatement ever comes not from a Brit or a Spartan but from the Japanese Emperor Hirohito. In August 1945, following Japan’s defeats in every recent battle and the obliteration of two cities with nuclear bombs, he broadcast that ‘the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage’. At 46, I
‘Autonomous machine operating here,’ says the sign. ‘Stay away.’ And instead of the chatter of the vendangeuses, there’s the hum of a robot. Welcome to southern France, 2024, just down the lane from my house, where, walking the dogs among the vines, I stumble upon Ted, a compact, green and white, battery-powered cultivator, guided by GPS satellites.