Gstaad From my desk facing the garden I look out on a vista of wooded green hills with an unblemished blue background. Far beyond, the mountains are grey and white-capped on top. The sun is blazing, the cows are grazing, and I have to leave this paradise for karate and judo training in the Bagel.
William was standing alone at the bus stop so I pulled over and offered him a lift into town. He accepted with alacrity. My passenger seat was a long way down, much further than he anticipated, and he lowered himself into it gingerly, and with difficulty and some agonised groaning. But once he was established
The insufferably smug family in the BT commercials is now more than an annoyance to me. Whenever I see them, I throw whatever I have in my hands at the television set and scream, ‘Liars!’. I have hated the BT family for years. Unlike the Oxo family, which was reassuringly grouchy and came to the
Should we cheer him or shun him? There was nothing special about the race on Wolverhampton’s all-weather track last Friday night, a 12-furlong handicap won by Paul Howling’s Our Kes, nothing special except for the fact that the jockey on board had ridden his last winner in Britain back in July 2006, at which point
What’s true of Hollywood is also true of fashion: no one knows anything As an ink-stained wretch living in New York in the Nineties, I was a little chippy about Anna Wintour. There I was, eking out a living as a general dogsbody at Vanity Fair, while she sat atop her throne as the editor
Q. Last weekend we went abroad to a birthday party of great friends of ours. We often meet them when they come to London, and invite them to join us at my club. They are coming to visit London again, this time with another couple, whom we hardly know. Of course we would like to
Taxi-drivers tell you all sorts of myths about history. (‘Yes, Blackheath got its name from the plague pits they dug there in the Black Death). The internet, it strikes me, is like a taxi-drivers’ convention. I’ve just come across this: ‘The phrase “the die is cast” has nothing to do with gambling or dice; instead,
Imagine for a moment that every policeman in Britain were issued with two or three tracking devices, each the size of a small packet of chewing gum. Magnetically attached to a car, it would record the target’s every movement for 48 hours using its inbuilt GPS. When retrieved and plugged into a computer, it would
