Coronis Embracing one’s vulnerability seems to have replaced the higher, faster, stronger ethos of the Olympics. The very frailty that makes us human appears to have triumphed over the need to excel, or so the Games sponsors tell us. Not that I watched any of it. Not a single second, so help me you-know-who. I
I was sitting quite still at the typewriter when a plump mouse emerged from under the fridge and crossed the kitchen floor, moving by monorail. Conscious suddenly of another presence, the mouse paused and cast a speculative and I thought conciliatory eye over me. His fur was a rich chocolate, his eye beady with interest.
‘Contact a GP if you’re worried about symptoms four weeks after having Covid.’ That was the NHS quote on the end of a story about Piers Morgan, who was still feeling ill three weeks after getting the lurgy. Me too, Piers. It took the builder boyfriend almost as long to get over it, and his
The fighting started just as Caroline turned right on to the Uxbridge Road after emerging from QPR’s stadium on Loftus Road. About 25 football fans began punching and kicking each other in the middle of the road, forcing the pedestrians on the crowded pavement to surge backwards to avoid being caught up in the mêlée.
Q. A very old friend has rented a holiday house and invited my husband and me to stay. The property happens to belong to another friend so we have stayed there in the past and know it’s fairly stupendous with cook, garden, pool, sea and mountains etc. It now goes for a massive rent which,
There was a marvellous general of yesteryear called George Burns. He had a good war and a splendid peace. He also held senior posts for longer than would be permitted in these diminished times. Colonel of the Coldstream for 32 years, he was Lord-Lieutenant of Hertfordshire for a quarter of a century. Many stories are
‘That chap in Line of Duty. That’s what I’d call a bad actor,’ said my husband with vague certainty. He was responding to a remark on the wireless about Iran being a bad actor. Language, as usual, is in a state of transition. Actor is now employed to mean some person, or moral entity, acting
In the beginning a slap gets it going and a child once told me breath’s here ‘to blow bubbles’. In heaven I was once informed breathing is no longer needed. I should have guessed. Breath’s always been a downmarket option, wholly belonging to earthly struggles, to life and death and other mundane matters.
Cleat hooks glinted on the window wall. We checked again the spotless parquet for paint flecks, even the galvanised conduits and trunking, the suspended lights. A song of an American summer played low. He slipped in ahead of schedule, mild, beige, miles from his reputation. From a chrome tin a telescopic aerial deftly linked to
Placed on a pile tenderly as if to encourage brief sleep, or easily torn from a tiny fist – a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand companions and twice the number of unseeing eyes made of glass. No child parent came back to reclaim their mannequin infant, no sudden cry, no crouching down to draw them
Metaphysics took my mindoff things. Now I’m coming to mysenses, An astronaut with his headin a washing machine. I stink, therefore I am.It’s a good start. The pure is sterile; thesterile is unclean. The stepwell smells like aswimmer’s towelling. That Euro coin’s aconsecrated host. It has travelled frombum-bags through tollgates To a church with apay-view
You hide behind dark glasses in a privacy of thought that when you take them off looks much like wisdom or so one might suppose from the light returning with such concentration to your steady gaze. An eloquent silence hangs in the air between us as it seems to contemplate becoming speech but then the
I often argue that, in theory at least, well-made cocktails are indisputably better than wines costing 20 times more. My argument runs as follows. In making a cocktail, you can mix, in any combination you wish, any of the liquids known to humanity. In making a wine, you are stuck with using grape juice harvested
