Gstaad Who was it who said good manners had gone the way of black and white TV? Actually it was yours truly after watching the slobs parading up and down Gstaad’s main street. That was last year, but the bad news is that this year slobovia has come to stay again. Mind you, Alexandra and
The four portraits of four siblings that Catriona had painted from their photographs over four months were framed, hung and lit and ready for a viewing by the loving parents. That so much creative endeavour should succeed or fail at a glance made me terribly glad I wasn’t a painter. At the appointed hour of
One of the village vegans gave the bacon sandwich resting on top of the recycling bin outside my house an accusing look. I had placed it there, on a plate, for the builder boyfriend who was underneath my jacked-up Volvo which had been making an alarming high-pitched wheeze. I always bring him a coffee and
Kenya Wondering what this year will bring, at dawn this morning I stood in the waves in front of our beach house and watched two Swahili sailing dhows battling through monsoon surf, heading out to the fishing grounds. For 1,500 years mariners off our East African coast have voyaged in these lovely boats and now,
Cooee, we’re back! And back in some style with a corking offer from Swig, stalwarts of the Spectator Wine Club under my sainted predecessors. I’m so pleased we’ve tempted them back, especially in this, their 25th anniversary year. Founded by Robin Davis in north London’s Belsize Park, Swig has become one of the country’s finest
I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Don’t Look Up, the new satirical film on Netflix. It’s about a couple of American scientists who discover a giant ‘planet-killing’ comet that’s going to collide with Earth in just over six months. They try to warn the world about this existential threat but no one takes them seriously,
Full homage to the nail-biting cricketing miracle in Sydney, while bearing in mind that miracles, like lightning, rarely strike twice and it’s a toss-up whether England’s Test team or Novak Djokovic was more deserving of deportation from Australia earlier this week. But only Test cricket could conjure up such a climax after five days of
Q. My cleaner is industrious and trustworthy but she doesn’t have many people to talk to and evidently looks forward to her shifts as social occasions. She loves having a captive audience (my brother and I are currently WFH) and her conversation consists mainly of complaints, so it’s never a fun chat. It’s generally a
It is a truism that there is never enough schnitzel (‘slice’, German); or, rather, schnitzel does not get the attention it deserves. Restaurants do serve it, of course. Fischer’s does a fine Wiener schnitzel, as part of its riotous pre-war Vienna tribute act, and elderly people, I am told, queue for it while wearing slankets.
My husband is forever being sent magazines from his Oxford college inviting him to give it money. I suggest he should ask it to give us money, since it has much more than we do. But the clever men at Oxford, as Mr Toad called them in his song, seem to have lost the use
Often it disappears – from hotels, harbours, airport carousels… but always it comes back to him. Trusting in the umbilical dance of instrument and player he stays calm in its absence. Amongst the cosmic flotsam orbiting Earth this minute There! Tauseef’s harmonium. On the sea bed, flexing its gills for ghazal-hungry shoals
