Athens Viewed from Mars, this is a sunny, peaceful city. Up close, however, things ain’t what they used to be. First, those wonderful Greek smiles are gone, replaced by wintry ones at best. People are worried, as well they should be. At the Divani Caravel hotel, once owned by yours truly, the staff greet me as
Denis was my guide to and from the new out-of-town Lidl superstore at Salernes in Provence. I drove. The road was a smooth ribbon of asphalt newly laid through an ancient forest of dwarf oaks. The in-car conversation with Denis was, as usual, easy and undogmatic and wide-ranging, which is the only sort of conversation
If these speed awareness courses get much more entertaining and informative they might become a dangerous incentive to break the limit just to get on to them. I qualified for my second one by doing 35 in a 30 at night in a strange place. Being lost and mercilessly tailgated as I crawled along a
Racing Life is all about judgment and I got one thing right at Cheltenham last Saturday after the overnight rain. Waved on to soggy grass by a parking attendant, I demurred, insisting that anyone who parked there would never drive off. I was waved on impatiently and foolishly let her win. When it came to
David Cameron can be a frustrating figure at times. He wrote an article for the Sunday Times this week in which he drew attention to the under-representation of disadvantaged students in Britain’s universities, which he was quite right to do. But he is wrong about the ethnicity of those students and wrong about where the
Just when you were thinking that the Premier League had become a much nicer place without José Mourinho in it, here comes another old friend from Stamford Bridge who can be relied on to pollute the atmosphere. Yes, it’s John Terry again, JT, Captain, Leader, Legend, who issued a tear-stained farewell saying Chelsea didn’t want
Q. My husband-to-be and I both work full time. We are getting married from his family HQ and his kind mother has effectively done all the planning. She’s done it all with superb taste and efficiency so I am loath to be critical about the one thing I don’t like. She has ordered laminated name
Le Caprice is a monochrome patch of the 1980s behind the Ritz Hotel, in the part of St James’s that looks like Monaco. (There is a car park.) It was, along with Langham’s and the Ivy, the most fashionable restaurant of the Thatcher years, beloved of media slags and wankers; also of Princess Diana (the
Last summer Kim Kardashian, who already had a daughter called North (surname West), announced that she was expecting a boy. She put a photograph on Twitter of herself pouting, captioning it: ‘Pregnancy lips’. Some Twitter-followers asked: ‘Pregnancy lips? Is that even a thing?’ The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary has since adopted that example as the locus
Was everybody scared? Mum was, certainly. Slip-clinging hold, respectability. World-lost, he didn’t care, Or didn’t cotton on. Inexplicably, He once broke out, performing memorably: Reckless, and with aplomb. Mistiming exquisite; Turning their stomachs; Master-class for me in how to flummox Guests: it was The Visit. Scented and Sunday-clad, – Teacups four-high, stacked,
