Gstaad Although no longer a regular habit, extended benders now turn me into a sort of magnetic field that picks up pearls as though they were iron filings. They are jewels of insight not the kind tarts hang around their necks to alert the viewer of their availability. Take, for example, a description of a
So I go to the all-night house party with my rolled-up yoga mat under my arm. Nice house, middle-class crowd, everybody drunk. Women’s screams coming from upstairs. Looking for the lavatory, I find one vacant at the top of the stairs. I’m in mid-stream when this bloke bursts in and slams the door again behind
‘Hello, I’d like my money back, please,’ I said to the nice lady on the other end of the line. And if the nice lady on the other end of the line had been working for anyone other than a utility company, I would probably have had my money back a few moments later. As
I’ve gone completely overboard with New Year’s Resolutions this year. I’ve sworn off three illicit substances — alcohol, chocolate and ice cream — and vowed to eat an apple every day. I’ve given up alcohol before. The first time was when I was living in New York in the 1990s, though the episode that prompted
In Dorchester during the Christmas holiday I bought a two-slice electric toaster at Currys. It was a nice little toaster that worked very well when I got it home. And it cost only £4.50, which turned out to be little more than half the price of a packet of Marlboro cigarettes. It’s some years since
At Christmas a friend from CNN sent me the story of a US officer on a European train. Searching for a seat, he found one occupied by a miniature poodle and asked its French female owner if she would put the dog on her lap. She not only refused but also remarked loudly as he
Tehran does not welcome pedestrians. It is eight o’clock on a July evening and the sun has plunged out of the air with alarming speed; the sky is the colour of wine, and the air is thick with the scent of heat and petrol. I have long forgotten where we are going. Dust-coloured buildings spill
Sir Vivian Richards came to watch me play cricket the other day. That’s the sort of sentence you wait a lifetime to write. What’s more it’s true. Sort of. I haven’t been able to say anything like that for ten years, just a few days before the Rugby World Cup final in Sydney in November
Q. We had our son’s fiancée and her family to stay recently. After dinner, expecting conversation, we were shocked to see them all slumped in our drawing room staring at their ‘tablets’ and, I presume, playing on the internet. What should my wife and I have done? I was tempted to do the crossword or
Woolley Grange is a child-friendly country house hotel that seems, at first, entirely monstrous — a grey Tudor house in Wiltshire, with gables like teeth and a pond outside, possibly haunted. It is like a smiling wife who bares her fangs and eats the car park and all the Hondas within; a cinematic fiend of
How do you play the lottery? The National Lottery website has a handy guide. Step No. 1 is: ‘Go into a store.’ But in my experience, lottery tickets are sold mostly in shops, along with confectionery and tobacco. You can, it is true, get them in Sainsbury’s, but I wouldn’t call that a store either,
Feeling my age, too soon too tired, Whatever gifts I had no more required, I am a hireling called in to be fired. Time was I was ambitious, heretofore. Not any more, not any more. Ridding myself of papers, pots, coins, books, No longer vain about what had been looks, The broth boiled over by
