Let’s start 2010 right and mention a few honest people in the news. I wrote this sentence a couple of hours ago, not realising how difficult it was going to be to find even one honest boldfaced name. Like old Diogenes, I am still looking as my deadline nears. Which reminds me: at least the
Almost without fail, I bash out a daily diary entry on a loose sheet of A4 then shove it in an old ringbinder. Glued on the inside cover of this ringbinder is a yellowing newspaper clipping. It’s a column by the late Nigel Nicolson, written around the time of the New Year, offering Sunday Telegraph
Top of my ambitions for this year: be less nice. Do fewer good turns. Be less amenable and most of all a lot less kind to animals. While this sounds a bit grim, you have to consider that I am starting from a very high base. If I go out of my way to be
I recently received an email from a friend asking if I would contribute to a book he’s editing entitled What Matters Now: prescriptions for a simpler life. ‘A new genre of literature is emerging about the roots of happiness,’ it began. ‘Authors like Alain de Botton, Oliver James and Naomi Klein argue that the materialist/celebrity
Q. As everyone knows, it is very hard to find non-cowboy plumbers in London so when our boiler broke, we went straight to an established firm of professionals. We paid £90 per plumber per hour but the job was done properly — by uniformed men who turned up on time and gave us a five-year
I haven’t been to see Avatar and I don’t suppose I shall, but I have just learnt how to say ‘Hello’ to a Na’vi in his own language. It is Kaltxì. The difficult bit is the consonant spelled tx, which is an ejective. I don’t want to go on about phonetics, because it is fearfully
At an airport recently I saw a sign for the public telephones; it was a symbol showing a round telephone dial with a receiver across the top. Nothing odd about this, you may think — that is if, like me, you are over 40. If you are under 20, on the other hand, it may
