Life

High life

High life | 7 May 2011

Mme Nhu, who died two days before THE wedding, was a hell of a woman. Her maternal grandmother was a Vietnamese princess of impeccable credentials, yet when she was captured by the commies in Hue in 1946, she stood up to them until the French rescued her four months later. She was anti-French and anti-commie,

Low life

Low life | 7 May 2011

We’ve ridden African elephants and done the evening game drive. In between I’ve had the full-body Swedish massage from a Zulu woman who used the point of her elbow and the side of her knee and was panting slightly throughout. Now we are six of us around a dinner table in a replica Zulu meeting

Real life

Real life | 7 May 2011

As if by magic, a letter arrived with answers to all my composting questions. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had received warning from the council that I might be in a food waste recycling area. Nothing was definite about it. It hadn’t seemed to occur to the form-shoveller pursuivants that they might

More from life

Status Anxiety: The unmovable and the irresistible

Until now, I thought David Cameron’s best week in politics was the one that began with the inconclusive result of the general election and ended with him standing beside Nick Clegg in the Downing Street rose garden. The skill with which he outmanoeuvred Gordon Brown reminded me of a comment made by Oliver van Oss,

The Wiki Man

The Wiki Man: Manual labour

I am writing this in the brown-carpeted lounge of Phoenix Sky Harbor, which claims to be America’s friendliest airport — and indeed that may well be so. I am writing this in the brown-carpeted lounge of Phoenix Sky Harbor, which claims to be America’s friendliest airport — and indeed that may well be so. Enough