The first rule of the summer party is do not hold your summer party on the same night as The Spectator. It’s social fight club. You can only lose. This is a rule, however, that our Prime Minister, among others on ‘the left’, ignored to offer competing attractions. Zarah Sultana MP went to the most
A rattling noise woke me in the dead of night and I fumbled my way into the dark corridor. It was coming from the room at the end of the hallway, which was occupied by a couple from West Virginia on a romantic road trip. The door rattled again as I stood there. I realised
Kenya My cattle sensei Mark revealed that my Boran bulls aren’t gaining enough masculine growth after weaning because they’re only just surviving on the droughted, brittle pastures of my farm at 6,000ft in Laikipia. They’re also starved half the time, since the perennial threat of armed cattle rustlers mean they must overnight in a stone
Salad cream makes me feel oddly patriotic. It’s one of those products that is so distinctively British that it has not travelled. Elsewhere, it is eschewed as a poor man’s mayonnaise. Its chief ingredients are hardboiled egg yolks, English mustard, vinegar and thick cream, and it was, in fact, the first product that Heinz produced
Hurrah! At last, I’ve persuaded the mighty Wine Society to grace our pages, and I’m delighted. Founded in 1874, the WS is the world’s oldest cooperative wine club, famed for sourcing top-quality wines at modest prices and for championing lesser-known regions. I’ve said it before: if, for whatever bizarre reason, I had to buy wine
It was my friend Alex who tipped me the wink. I bumped into him at a party earlier this year and to my astonishment he’d lost about two stone and was nursing a glass of fizzy water. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked, draining a goblet of red wine. ‘You’re usually about three sheets to
Q. We are going to stay with some old friends who we haven’t seen for a couple of years as they have been working in the US. I happen to know that they now have widely different political views to my husband’s ‘far-right’ opinions. How I can stop any potential conversations getting out of hand,
What to drink while watching cricket? Beer or even Pimm’s for the village green, but I think that a Test match on television demands wine. What a series we are having: likely to go down in the record books as a great example of the greatest of games. Cricket incites memories. The current Indian side
‘She and I work together, we think together,’ said Sir Keir Starmer of Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. ‘In the past, there have been examples – I won’t give any specific – of chancellors and prime ministers who weren’t in lockstep. We’re in lockstep.’ ‘Sounds like you and me,’ said my husband sarcastically.
these days to rob any bank would take a certain élan – a Clyde-like bohomie – smiling shouting ‘Thanks’ as you fire over their heads a sweep of the hat a flourish before you run now The Banks are boarded-up or have taken a turn
Who wanted to be my mammy. Who I wanted to be my mammy. We didn’t tell anyone not even ourselves. Mother stood in the way obdurate, certain of ownership, not knowing I’d fallen in love with another. Ida wanted to hold me I wanted Ida to hold me It never happened. We knew it was
Only I was allowed to sit on the Golden Bidet of Lerici. Lord Byron sat on it as well as Percy Bysshe and Mary. D.H. Lawrence swung by and perched there like a demigod – as well as Frieda von Richthofen. Virginia Woolf sat on it in 1933 knocking out a beautiful sentence – Max
The device you see on this page is called a ‘paceometer’ and was devised by behavioural scientists Eyal Peer and Eyal Gamliel. It features in their scientific paper ‘Pace yourself: Improving time-saving judgments when increasing activity speed’. Study it carefully, because as many people have confirmed to me, it will ‘change the way you drive
