Spectator Life

Spectator Life

An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.

Sober October is awful. That’s why I do it

As Sober October comes to an end and we turn our attention to two months of forced festivities, it might be time to ask ourselves if these month-long periods of sobriety actually do anything. In short, I’ve found the answer is that they do. This year, I attempted Dry January. Why? For one simple reason:

The finest Rhône I have ever tasted

The medics would have one believe that alcohol is a depressant. That may be their conclusion drawn from test tubes in laboratories. Fortunately, however, it bears little relation to real life, which is just as well. The world has rarely been in greater need of antidepressants, in every form. One tries to tease American friends

I’m a Nisbets addict

It’s a bright autumn morning and I’m first through the doors. There are only two shops that can inspire such a disregard for my finances, and the other is Swedish. Today I find myself in Nisbets, and the first rule of Nisbets is not to bring a shopping list. If you’ve not heard of it,

Lara Prendergast

With Tim Spector

27 min listen

Tim Spector is a leading professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London and a renowned expert in nutrition, gut health, and the microbiome. He is the founder of the Zoe Project, which focuses on personalised nutrition and how individual responses to food impact health. His new book, The Food for Life Cookbook, is out now.

Ozempic and the sugar coating of reality

Old or young, fat or thin, body-positive or body-embarrassed, man or woman, everyone with money seems to be on a weight-loss drug: Wegovy, Mounjaro or Ozempic (which although a diabetes drug, is so often used off label for weight loss that there have been supply shortages). In the past couple of weeks alone, two freewheeling

British vineyards are suffering

Across vineyards in England and Wales, secateurs are being sharpened and buckets are at the ready as owners prepare for harvest. October is usually the month commercial vines give up their fruit before being whisked away to the winemaker–cum–alchemist who turns the juice into wine. As a former vineyard owner (I sold up in January)

Cooking lessons from the wild

These days, it’s fashionable to get deliveries of vegetable boxes. Some do it through devotion to the dour idol of seasonality; the true worshipper knows they are buying a challenge. Many great recipes are created to deal with gluts and shortages. Digby Anderson, in his wonderful Spectator food column, pointed out that every good kitchen

Olivia Potts

The secret to making great oysters Rockefeller

There’s nothing more intriguing than a closely guarded secret recipe. Coca-Cola and KFC are two famous examples, with the precise ingredients for the soda syrup and special coating kept in guarded vaults: the story is that those who hold the information aren’t allowed to travel on the same plane in case of disaster. Lea &

Admit it, roast dinners are bad

Sunday lunch is a bit like the Edinburgh festival. People make a big thing of it, it’s considered a British treasure, and I am meant to book it, go to it, and like it. But I don’t. If Edinburgh is forever associated in my mind with glowering edifices of grim dark stone, hostile chilly sun

Alan Clark’s wines were as remarkable as he was

Où sont les bouteilles d’antan? For that matter, où sont les amis with whom one consumed them? These autumnally melancholic musings arose because a young friend asked me about Alan Clark. He had been reading the Diaries. Were they truthful? Was Alan really such a remarkable character? The answer was simple. An emphatic yes, on

Gutweed and bladderwrack? Yum!

Foraging has become a sign of status rather than a lack of it and seaweed is perhaps the most abundant wild food of all. The alternative is mushrooms, but I’ve always thought fungus-hunting a bit too wild; the possibility of a first-class risotto being offset by the risk of death or, worse, expanded consciousness. Rotting seaweed

Olivia Potts

The joy of tarte Tatin

When it comes to traditional recipes, there are few things we love more than an unlikely origin story, ideally one born out of clumsiness or forgetfulness. The bigger the kitchen pratfall, the more delicious the product. Setting pancakes on fire? Accidental crêpe Suzette! Nothing in the restaurant apart from lettuce and some pantry ingredients? The

Tanya Gold

An inedible catastrophe: Julie’s Restaurant reviewed

At Julie’s at the fag end of Saturday lunchtime, Notting Hill beauties are defiantly not eating, and the table is covered with crumbs. Restaurant Ozymandias, I think to myself. This is no longer a district for the perennially wracked, or unrich. The Black Cross – Martin Amis’s ideal pub in London Fields – is now

25 years on, no one compares to the Two Fat Ladies

They were loud, vivacious and gloriously un-PC.  Sometimes they seemed to be learning how to cook as they went, barely one step ahead of the viewer. It didn’t matter. If anything, it only made the BBC’s Two Fat Ladies more watchable. And 25 years on – the last of the two dozen episodes pairing Jennifer

Nick Elliott and a life worth drinking to

The English language has immense resources, but the odd weakness. What, for instance, is the translation for ‘Auld lang syne’? We were discussing that profound topic while telling stories about absent friends, recalling the occasional bottle and thinking about Britain. Nick Elliott’s response to grim news was to open a bottle of Mouton Rothschild ’82

Lara Prendergast

With Charlie Bigham

31 min listen

Charlie Bigham founded his eponymous ready to cook meals over 25 years ago. Having left a career as a management consultant, his company has gone on to report annual sales in the tens of millions, with a focus on ‘creating delicious dishes for people who love proper food’. His first cookbook ‘Supper with Charlie Bigham’

Hello, waiter? Yes, I’d like to complain

As I leant over to speak to one of my dining companions in a busy restaurant, I felt something shuffle on my knee. I briefly wondered if it was a rat. But it was just a busybody waiter, who had taken my napkin from the table and folded it upon my lap. It was a

Paul Wood, Ross Clark, Andrew Lycett, Laura Gascoigne and Henry Jeffreys

33 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: as Lebanon reels from the exploding pagers, Paul Wood wonders what’s next for Israel and Hezbollah (1:24); Ross Clark examines Ireland’s low-tax project, following the news that they’re set to receive €13 billion… that they didn’t want (8:40); Reviewing Ben Macintyre’s new book, Andrew Lycett looks at the 1980 Iranian

Cheers to corkscrews!

For the first 50 years of the corked bottle, there was no easy way to get into it. The combination of cork and a strong glass bottle came together around 1630 but the first mention of a device to open the bloody thing wasn’t until 1681. Cavalier get-togethers must have resembled the teenage parties I

Tanya Gold

As good as Noble Rot: Cloth reviewed

Cloth is opposite St Bartholomew the Great on Cloth Fair. People call this place Farringdon, but it isn’t really: it belongs to the teaching hospital and the meat market and William Wallace who died a famous death here and has only a little plaque in turn. Smithfield embraces the dead. Sherlock Holmes met Dr Watson

Olivia Potts

Give vitello tonnato a chance

I am sure there are beloved British dishes that inspire horror in those from different cultures, that are truly unappealing to the uninitiated. I can quite imagine that the bright green eel-gravy that traditionally accompanies the East End pie and mash could be figuratively and literally hard to swallow for a visitor. Or that our

The wonder of wine from the Mosel

Conservatives used to be good at inspiring a mass membership, underpinned by organisations. Before the first world war, the Primrose League had a million members. Shortly after the second war, the party’s membership, including the Young Conservatives, reached three million. This is partly explained by the social mores of the day. The range of available

Olivia Potts

With Simon Raymonde

28 min listen

Musician Simon Raymonde is perhaps best known as part of the Scottish band the Cocteau Twins, but he has found further success as the co-founder of Bella Union Records. Bella Union produce music by Father John Misty, the Fleet Foxes, and Beach House, amongst others. His memoir In One Ear: Cocteau Twins, Ivor Raymonde and Me is released

Olivia Potts

The no-bake bliss of icebox cake

Standing in the biscuit aisle of my local supermarket, I’m overwhelmed by possibilities. This isn’t unusual for me, but normally it’s fuelled by greed, and resolved by buying them all. Today I have to make a choice. I am making an American icebox cake, which requires a lot of one type of biscuits, and the

Tanya Gold

Curiously understated: Porthminster Kitchen reviewed

Porthminster Kitchen sits above Warren’s Bakery on St Ives Harbour, like a paradigm of the British class system in food. This happens everywhere, but it is particularly pronounced in St Ives, which is unlucky enough to be a site of pilgrimage for Virginia Woolf addicts – her childhood holiday home sits above the town, her

Julie Burchill

Beware the celebrity booze merchants

There are quite a few ‘theories’ (what the middle classes call gossip nowadays) about why Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck have sundered their union for a second time. Personally, I’m of the entirely uninformed opinion that one of the contributing factors may have been that Jennifer Lopez – like many a celeb – has her

The treasures of sherry

We were talking Spain and drinking Spanish. The UK and Spain are very different societies, but we did find points of comparison. As a very broad generalisation, Spaniards can be divided into three political groupings. There is a Europhile elite who take their political identity from a projected European future, and almost none from their