New York Election night parties are usually dreadful affairs, with the idiot box blaring and hysterical listeners screaming out the latest info. American TV pundits are smug trained seals, over made-up and blow-dried, and they all sound the same with their rehearsed stentorian voices. Brian Williams, or the ‘hero of Iraq’ as I call him
We bums find ourselves sought after at this time of year to lend a hand with the olive harvest. So this week I’ve been standing on a tarpaulin in a sunny field combing olives off olive branches. It’s a good year for olives. The trees are laden and the work is pleasantly monotonous. The minimal
Panic at the country feed store. Panic in the horse and pony aisle. I wonder to myself: could life ever be sane again? With apologies to Morrissey and Marr, I started singing a version of their seminal hit on the way back from getting the horse and dog food and I have been humming it
And it was all going so well. Actually, that’s a complete lie. Nothing’s going well for any of us. What I meant was that since I gave my poor liver such a merciless pounding during the last lockdown, I had decided not to drink a drop during Lockdown #2. Last time there was no apparent
When Humza Yousaf, the SNP’s cabinet secretary for justice, announced that his new Hate Crime Bill would remove the ‘dwelling exemption’ in the Public Order Act 1986, people were understandably horrified. As things stand, you cannot be prosecuted for stirring up racial hatred because you’ve said something inflammatory about race or religion in the privacy
Q. I have a delightful young goddaughter who, thanks to the virus, I have not seen since last year. Her next birthday is looming, but since she never thanked me for my present last year, I am disinclined to give another. However, there may be a mitigating factor. Last year while her mother and I
At least in London, midwinter spring has not been entirely vanquished, and the trees are still a couple of strong winds away from losing their autumn glory. This will give the government some undeserved help. People can sit outside, and the view from windows is not too depressing. Before long, though, those indoors are likely
Boris Johnson, the Telegraph suggested last week, is understood to have a personal interest in rewilding, ‘recently gifting his father beavers to release on his own Exmoor estate’. I started at the word gifting like a horse shying at a carrier bag caught in the hedge. Why didn’t I like it? My first thought was
In 1989 I answered my first mobile phone call on Oxford Street using a brick-sized Motorola borrowed from work. Several people shouted abuse at me from passing cars. Back then, it was also rare to make a mobile-to-mobile call. If you did, it was the main topic of conversation for the first few minutes: ‘Where
First the company report. Readers who invested a tenner on the nose each time our Twelve to Follow for the Flat turned out have made a wallet-warming profit of £638. Only the management consultants on whom a panicky government has showered gold-plated contracts with no questions asked have done better than that in these Covid
