An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
The year was 2015, and I was head over heels, completely obsessed with House of Hackney’s Palmeral wallpaper. The bold print features fans of colonial green palm leaves splayed across a soothing off-white background, and I fantasised about plastering it over all four walls of my London living room, thinking it was the closest I
Plenty about the Top Gun sequel has garnered anticipation, not least because Covid has consistently pushed the release date, which coincidentally finally landed around the time of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. At the Diamond Jubilee, we had Paloma Faith discuss both royal matters and her new album during the BBC’s questionable coverage. At the Royal
In the past couple of years successive lockdowns and the need for self-contained holidays meant record numbers of people embraced motorhomes and campervans for the first time. 16,608 new motorhomes were registered with the DVLA in 2021, topping the existing sales record by 8 per cent. But was this just a lockdown fad? Not if the latest sales
The RHS Chelsea Flower Show is mere weeks away – the floral spectacular that inspires us all to head out into gardens once again. In May and June a host of British flora comes to life, with dabbles of bubblegum peonies, shocking fuchsia azaleas and the syrupy smell of lilacs in the air. So why
The Duchess of Cornwall revealed a surprising hobby during a visit to a charity shop on Tuesday. After splashing out on a £1.50 mug celebrating the Queen’s Jubilee, Camilla confessed that she has a ‘whole collection’ of royal memorabilia at home. With the Platinum Jubilee just weeks away, there will be plenty more opportunities for the
Fringes have in recent years been considered attractive – Bettie Page, Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Birkin, Kate Moss – so it is easy to forget the period we have been living through is something of an aberration. For most of history, cutting a fringe has tended to mark a woman out as odd, mad or suspicious.
If there’s one company that’s a kind of stock market indicator of the condition of the British middle classes, it’s Lakeland. It specialises in very good household stuff – cleaning and cookware and any number of ingenious gadgets (the catalogues are, I have to say, addictive) – and it has an uncanny knack of registering
The Queen has spent more time than most deciding what to wear to work each day, having spent the last 70 years as monarch. As one of the most photographed women in the world, her dress sense has played a large role in defining her image as a timeless figure who rises above cultural trends and
As a pubescent teenager back in the late 1970s, I was delighted to once find a discarded copy of The Sun newspaper on a tube train, handily folded back to reveal page three. Having admired Miranda from Epping my eyes shifted to the report of a court case in which a retired brigadier had been
The English Rock Garden, the magnum opus of the great gardening writer, horticulturist and plant collector Reginald Farrer, is an indispensable A to Z guide to alpine flowers. When he finally reaches V, Farrer writes: ‘Viola brings this alphabet to the last great dragon in its path.’ But rather than offering fire-breathing terror, he presents
If fuel prices are making you splenetic, the driving techniques designed to make that fuel go further might restore a degree of calm. Driving with economy in mind is all about smoothness, anticipation, being aware of your surroundings and not rushing things. Serial congestion means that, more often than not, an easy going journey is only
Mother’s Day (more properly, Mothering Sunday) is an occasion when it really is the thought that counts. You can give your mother a bunch of daffodils and a home-made card, and tea in bed if you live at home, and, unless your mother is Cruella de Vil, it’ll make her day. When I was a
The best part of a decade elapsed between Land Rover’s unveiling of the ‘DC100’ concept at the 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show and the first ‘New Defenders’ hitting the road two years ago just as Covid struck – prompting suggestions that the beefy SUV had arrived ‘just in time for Armageddon’. During the interim, thousands of column
To add a library to a house is to give that house soul – at least, so said Cicero. Unfortunately we’re not all as blessed in the book department as Ernest Hemingway, whose Cuban library boasted a ten-foot long desk ‘curved like a boomerang’. Modern living is often short on space. But that does not mean you can’t create a cosy
Despite having to cope with family strife, a partying prime minister, the unctuous musings of BBC Royal Correspondent Nicholas Witchell and, most recently, a bout of Covid, our Queen conducted herself in the only way she knows how during the first two months of her platinum jubilee – with the utmost dignity. But ‘dignified’ might
I’m not sure how a family of Warsaw bakers – my own – ended up in the northeast of England, specifically Sunderland, in England in the 1860s. The family myth – and it is a myth, because we have absolutely no evidence for it – is that they planned to take ship for America, but
The old banger is a vanishing breed. And it’s not because all drivers want new cars. On the contrary, not everyone wants to pay out monthly for a fast-depreciating asset. Many drivers would rather opt for a cheap, serviceable car in its dotage. Although I write about cars for a living, and shiny new ones sometimes cross my path, cars
Hands up if you’ve ever had your house decorated and strategically placed a couple of empty tins of Farrow & Ball Dead Salmon on the doorstep so the neighbours appreciate your excellent taste. It happens a lot, says Henry Prideaux, a London-based interior designer who agrees that a certain kind of paint brand, ‘can appeal
Set on a frozen Alpine lake in the glitzy Swiss ski resort of St. Moritz, the 37th annual Snow Polo World Cup — the world’s oldest snow polo tournament, held over the last weekend in January — is quite the sight to behold. With 322 days of sunshine per year, St. Moritz’s cloudless winter sky is the kind of
Brooklyn Beckham, the eldest son of David and Victoria, has launched a new television show Cookin’ with Brooklyn which allegedly took £70,000 and a team of 62 professionals to create. The result is an 8-minute episode that produced a fish-finger sandwich. Brooklyn oversees an assembly of chefs preparing the ingredients, he looks into the camera, totally
Readers of a certain age might remember when some car marques were the butt of relentless derogatory jokes. Czech brand Skoda – which has since been brought up-market under VW ownership – was an especially popular victim (Q: ‘What do you call a Skoda with a sunroof?’ A. ‘A skip..’) as were Lada (Q. ‘How
Does the future of motoring really lie in electric cars? Battery powered motors are now commonplace, but a few intrepid British drivers have gone for hydrogen fuel cell models instead. They currently have two choices. The £69,495 Hyundai Nexo (28 sales) and the £55k plus Toyota Mirai (about 200 owners including James May), so they’re hardly cheap.
I love wearing ties. I like to match the colour or pattern of it with another aspect of my ensemble. I have a navy and grey basket weave tie from E. Tautz that goes well with my navy basket weave tweed sports jacket and grey flannel trousers from the great Terry Haste. Or my navy
EVs have been easy to poke fun at over the years. Comedian Chris McCausland has a popular stand-up sketch about how Jaguar spent four years developing a space age noise for its electric i-Pace, only to silence it because people were looking skywards when they heard one coming towards them. And yet, despite their futuristic novelty, society has actually
‘The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.’ So said Freud in 1899 as the world was about to tip over into the dream obsessed twentieth century and its many decades of tortured introspection. For years, Freud has been roundly discredited. But it seems that,
2030 is the deadline: the end of petrol cars in Britain. Because nothing lasts forever. ‘This may be the last petrol car that I design,’ said a British marque designer, sketching lines on a napkin wistfully. I threw the napkin in a trunk in the attic for memorial. I have become addicted to petrol cars
Say it quietly, but a new must-have accessory is stalking the bank accounts of Britain’s middle classes. Like several of the other essential baubles of bourgeois life (BMWs, Audis etc) it hails from Germany, and just like these brands it’s pitiless in its quest for your dosh. But it’s also very, very good. Step forward
The royals, like most families, had a very different Christmas last year due to Covid restrictions. Traditionally, multiple generations of the family gather at Sandringham House for the festivities. This year the Queen is expected to return to her Norfolk residence once again, to host her extended family for what will be a poignant Christmas
Like a lot of things it began with the cleaners. You may be old enough to remember when there were actual cleaners in offices before they all vanished about 20 years ago. In fact they didn’t disappear, they just got outsourced. That usually meant that nothing much got cleaned especially anymore, but bins were changed
