Spectator Life

‘Buglers are operating in this area’ warns the Metropolitan Police sign, heralding the sound of trumpets perhaps. Aggravated burglary is often described as ‘a burglary gone wrong’, the planned effortless removal of domestic goods having met with some kind of ‘unforeseen’ opposition, the fireside poker taken up by the victim perhaps, or an XL Bully.

Ask my friends and family and they’ll tell you: I am an electric car bore. I’m not a gushing enthusiast. I’m more the negative kind of EV dullard. I can’t stop telling people about the horror of driving these wretched things. I’m really not like this about other subjects, or indeed about life. I’m generally

I am a procrastinator: a time-waster, a faffer-about, an idler, a vacillator. A self-loathing, self-sabotaging masochist grappling with that mad parody of perfectionism, which leads, instead of efficiency, to neglect, apathy, inertia, distraction, and great pain. It is irrational but irresistible. It is to time-keeping the greatest false economy since the finances of the Weimar

I doubt that Sir Keir Starmer has ever been inside a TK Maxx. I don’t see him, even in his early parliamentary days, hunting and rummaging for designer fashion, or trying on dozens of duds in a bid to find ‘the one’. We know the Prime Minister loves swanky clothes at the lowest possible price

The NHS uses 130,000 pagers, 10 per cent of the world’s total, and a fraction that slightly increased on 17 September when several thousand of those belonging to Hezbollah exploded. In fact, the NHS, where I work, and Hezbollah share certain problems when it comes to communication infrastructure. A few years ago, I was delighted

I grew up in the America of the 1960s, an era renowned for its kaftan-wearing hippies, its ethos of free love and hallucinogens, and demos against the Vietnam War. This was something that caught the imagination of my two London-born, English sons, once they were old enough to have acquired some knowledge of recent social

I try to head for cooler climes year-round but particularly during the summer, as anything over 20 degrees has me sweating like a pervert and swearing like a docker. But this year I was persuaded to join friends in Corfu, and so with my younger daughter in tow, I braced myself for the inevitable perimenopausal

They came straight off the back of a lorry and were placed carefully – top to tail – in three cat carriers, two hens in each. Broken feathers stuck from the air vents, bright, suspicious, amber eyes peered out. We drove them home, listening out for any squawks of distress, but they were silent. Bemused,

While ambling along a quiet beach with my husband near our home, our attention was caught by a water skier in the distance. As we stood watching him zip at high speed across the bay, we were interrupted by a gentle nuzzling at our legs. My husband and I were being greeted by a youngish

My first brush with Artificial Intelligence was the Furby – that hideous speaking Gonk with eyes that blinked. You could hear the cogs turning. It felt basic, even for the 2000s. My techie ex got it for me as a birthday present. Like babies, this infant technology responded to clapping. It was weird and dull.

For most parents whose teenage years pre-dated Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, few things are as terrifying as the social media use of their children. What might seem like harmless fun, such as posting memes, sharing photos, or venting frustrations, can have life-changing consequences. As a barrister who represents students, I have seen how a

Many years ago I wrote a book called Dreams and Doorways, a collection of interviews with well-known people – writers, actors, politicians, sports personalities – about their childhood. I wanted to find out how their early experiences helped to turn them into the high-achieving adults they later became. And in almost every case, some kind

Two photos from the youth of Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance have recently surfaced and are filling his opponents with glee. In one of them, he’s dressed as a woman, with shoulder-length golden hair, a look of yet-to-be-plucked wistfulness, and three days of teenage stubble. The other shows him loitering in a men’s bathroom, a

Balanced rakishly on my late grandmother’s china parrot is a MAGA hat bought in 2016 when it seemed highly improbable that Trump would beat the walking pantsuit, Hillary. Much like my Vote Leave badge, I bought it as a piece of provocative fast-fashion and my ever-expanding archive of political merchandise from the last decade. I

I’ve never been seduced by the circus. As a motif in children’s literature, particularly taken up by Enid Blyton and Disney. In fact, as an animal-loving child, I think I found it cruel; I wanted Nellie the Elephant to pack her bags and say goodbye to the circus, I longed for her to slip her

My wife and I have only ever dated by accident. After our third date a decade ago (well, what I thought was our third date) that she texted me asking, ‘So was that just dinner and theatre, or was it “dinner and theatre?”’ To this day, she insists that she had no idea what was

I am never allowed to forget that at my fourth birthday party I made clear my expectation to my mother and the gathered guests that I expected to win all the games. The logic was clear and to my mind (still) fair: it was my birthday and so I should win. When this wasn’t passed

The Cotswolds used to be a wonderfully bucolic fantasy of English villages; red telephone boxes, gilded honey-stone hamlets with verdant greens where the vicar would umpire cricket matches, and pubs where poachers and gamekeepers would mix. Then it became fashionable and now it’s been Farrow & Balled to within an inch of its life. The

You might remember that short period during the pandemic when eggs were unavailable. I was very annoyed that the one period when I had time to cook breakfast in the mornings there was no breakfast to cook. However, I was finally able to persuade my wife that we needed to keep chickens. Purely for logistical