Gstaad Back in the good old days a funicular used to take skiers up, bucking all the way and stopping from time to time when the snowdrifts across the track got too deep. We used to wax our skis at every opportunity, deposit them in the baggage car, and ride the outdoor car. Most of
All told, I find that in the last week I’ve slept with a Chinaman, three black women from the United States, four South Korean women and one South Korean man. I slept with the South Korean man first, for two nights running, at the Chameleon Hostel in Alicante. Joon-woo and I shared a 9’ by
Shoot me if I ever let slip I’ve been mucking out with rubber gloves and a dustpan and brush. As God is my witness, I have just left a stable yard where the clientele were all ‘non-riders’ — women whose only joy in horse-owning was to make the mucking out last as long as possible.
When the generals have lost heart and crept away from the battlefield it is hard for the ground troops to keep up their spirits. Although the Cheltenham Festival buzz is already in the air, BetBright Chase Day at Kempton Park last Saturday definitely had something deflated about it. Everybody was still doing their jobs but
When Kingsley Amis won the Booker prize for The Old Devils in 1986, he said that he had previously thought of the Booker as a rather trivial, showbizzy sort of caper, but now considered it a very serious, reliable indication of literary merit. It was a joke, evidently. Indeed, when he said it during his
I adore the wines of New Zealand. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if I had to drink the wines of just one country — taking France out of the equation, of course — then New Zealand would do it for me. There are spectacular aromatic whites from Marlborough, Gisborne
A friend was at Twickenham on Sunday sitting not far from the Italian coaching top brass, Conor O’Shea and Mike Catt. After an early tackle, and no ruck being formed, the Italian players ran to take up space in front of the England backs, blocking their attacking options. ‘That’s offside,’ shouted my friend. Catt, who
My partner has become a recycling fascist. She checks everything I put into the bin. I received two bollockings today alone — the first at breakfast because I did not make a distinction between the top of my small bottle of Actimel (non-recyclable) and the bottle (recyclable). I do try to do my best, but is
Ferdi is a café in Shepherd Market; I write about it only to comfort you, because you are not rich, and so you cannot afford to go there, because you would have to pay £140 for two courses without wine. It probably thinks it is a restaurant, wants to be a restaurant, but it isn’t.
I have long pondered the motive with which Michael Wharton, for long the author of the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple column, gave a memorable detail in his second volume of memories, A Dubious Codicil, about the habits of his rival Colin Welch: ‘He had a habit of picking his nose, occasionally tasting the extracted mucus
