An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
We can blame Robbie Burns. That line about my love being like a red, red rose didn’t actually specify Valentine’s Day, but it has meant that 14 February is forever associated with roses at a time of year when they’re not in bloom. Not here anyway, which means that all the red roses around are
At 3 a.m, with sleepless hours slipping by as storms besiege my tent, it’s easy to ask: why? Why swap the security of a home for a pilgrimage on foot with no itinerary beyond a smudged path on a 14th century map? And no comforts beyond those carried on my back or offered by strangers?
When I was little, toasties were my father’s domain. Many of his fillings cruelly haven’t made it on to mainstream toastie menus (tinned chicken curry was my mother’s favourite) – but his corned beef and onion one has stood the test of time in our household, and toasties remain a mainstay in my grown-up home.
I make no apologies for the fact that over the next month I will spend a lot of time looking forward to what I regard as Britain’s finest annual sporting event: the Cheltenham Festival. Yes, there will be groans from racegoers that Guinness is a rip-off at £7.50 a pint; yes, it can get overcrowded
Thousands of people have fled London for buzzy, creative Bristol in recent years. Among them: top chefs, bakers, brewers and baristas. ‘There’s a thriving community of young food entrepreneurs, many refugees from the viciously profit-driven London restaurant scene,’ says Xanthe Clay, chef, food writer and Bristolian. ‘They are taking advantage of lower rents and rates to
A transgender woman and a non-binary person dressed as Satan walk into a bar. That’s not the beginning of a bad joke, but the defining performance of the 65th Grammy awards, held in Los Angeles on Sunday. You may have seen the clips. The singer Sam Smith wore what appeared to be a terrible Halloween
Known as Wales’s first tycoon, the industrialist and Liberal politician David Davies was born in 1818 in a hillside tenement in the village of Llandinam, Powys. Davies, the son of a farmer and sawyer, went on to amass a fortune through bridge-building, railways, coal-mining and dock development, while also serving as an MP for Cardigan.
In a newspaper article five years ago, Michael Gove singled out the tax exemptions enjoyed by private schools thanks to their charitable status as one of the ‘burning injustices’ of our time. He took it for granted that scrapping these benefits would raise money and proposed spending it on children in care instead. ‘How can
There is one advantage to a stay in hospital followed by confinement to barracks: time to read and to think. I have devoted a lot of thought to great topics; do I hear ‘sublime’ and ‘ridiculous’? My two subjects have been the existence of God and the prospects of the Tories winning the next election.
When Land Rover finally axed its ‘old’ Defender in 2016 and promised to replace it with something better, traditionalists shed tears as readily as their beloved old-school Landys dripped oil. And the arrival of the ‘new’ Defender in early 2020 did nothing to help: ‘too expensive’, said some; ‘too complicated’, said others. ‘Too precious’, they
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…
As trophy homes go, the Grade II*-listed Glen Usk is hard to top. Set on the west bank of the River Usk in Wales, it is a white rendered neoclassical fairy-tale of a Georgian country house and its current owners have thoroughly renovated the eight-bedroom home, set in 35 acres. At the tail end of 2021
On a cold Tuesday night, as the wind whipped in from the North Sea, I joined 220 hardy souls to watch a game of football. Less than a mile away from the Sizewell nuclear plant on the Suffolk coast but light years away from the lurid lights of the Premiership, Leiston FC were playing Ilkeston
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
I’m a 30th generation Cornishman. I’m so Cornish my mum can make Cornish pasties blindfolded, my maternal grandmother was employed aged nine to break rocks in a Cornish tin mine (she was a ‘bal maiden’), and my second cousins founded Cornish Solidarity, which is the very-lightly-armed wing of Mebyon Kernow (the Cornish Plaid Cymru). Nonetheless
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
At first glance, I wasn’t sure if an email I got recently about ‘adults-only flights’ was a joke. I’m a parent of two teenage boys who has observed with dismay the growing intolerance for children in the public square in recent years. But I’d never heard anything like this. So I reviewed the study of 1,000 adults
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
One of the nicest parts about writing this weekly column for Spectator Life is the informed comments that greet it each week from readers. I am thinking specifically about people such as ‘Simian Leer’, ‘Oswald Grimes’ and ‘Simon’. This week my thanks go to ‘Simian’, who in late December highlighted the chances of NASSALAM in
It’s six o’clock and you’ve fought your way on to a train at a major London terminus. The carriage is rammed – heavily pregnant women, the stricken and the young stand in the corridors like it’s A&E – and everywhere people are diving into takeaways. The pungent egg and cress sandwich from Pret is bursting
If the 20th century was the age of the common man, the 21st is the age of the common man’s confounding. Between shambolic politics, culture wars and actual war, nothing is turning out quite as well as anyone expected. What was meant to be an era of freedom and enlightenment seems to have become the
The final trimester of pregnancy is a strange time. You’ll be told to rest, as if you can somehow bank sleep. The reality is likely to be a dash to buy everything you need, as well as don’t need (a hi-tech ‘nappy bag’ for instance). Once the baby arrives, even trying to get out of
When we were little we used to go on holiday to the same place in Brittany, a picturesque, quiet coastal town. There wasn’t a lot to do there for children, but I always looked forward to the holidays because of the food. It was the first time I was exposed to French food, and it
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
If you think the Calcutta Cup is just any old rugby match between England and Scotland, then the latest in BT Sport’s fine series of documentaries should put you straight. It’s called The Grudge and is about the 1990 Calcutta Cup, the climax to the Five Nations with everything at stake for the first and
Restaurant and dog years are similar, and so the Wolseley, which is 20 this year, seems as if it has always been here. Other restaurants fall so swiftly you have only fragments of impressions. Breakfast on Bond Street in what feels like a one-bedroom flat belonging to Patrick Bateman. Pasta in a cellar with art,
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
Last week saw the publication of the 14th annual Estrella Damm Top 50 Gastropubs of Great Britain, a list consumed by middle-class foodies as eagerly as a £27 fish finger sandwich served on a piece of slate, washed down by a non-alcoholic cocktail in a jam jar. Couples scroll through former drinking holes transformed into Michelin-starred