Gstaad Lenin Moreno is in trouble, despite his very unchristian first name. For any of you unfamiliar with the name, Senor Moreno is the president of Ecuador, a tiny South American country that I like very much because if you’ve met one Ecuadorian man you’ve met them all. There are 16 million Ecuadorians, and eight
Last Tuesday a Mistral wind blowing across the Bay of Angels jerked the plane all over the shop as it circled to land. The French lady in the next seat but one to mine vomited raucously and copiously on the carpet and a speedy boarder sprinted for the toilet. A second before the wheels should
Being told I am now both short-sighted and long-sighted feels like someone is playing a very bad joke on me. I would say I’ve always been as blind as a bat but I don’t want the Bat Society to complain. Lately, every time I go to the optician a different practitioner has what feels like
Death and failure are more integral to farming than any other experience that I’ve witnessed in my life. Some things are out of our hands — like the plagues of desert locusts heading our way from Ethiopia, promising to devour all our green pastures within hours of their arrival. Other things are within our power,
Reading about the Oscars this week, I couldn’t help thinking back to a time when they actually meant something. When I lived in America in the mid-1990s, the Academy Awards were described as ‘the gay Super Bowl’ which, although it sounded flippant, acknowledged their cultural significance. And judging from the number of people who watched
What we have learned in the past few weeks: 1) Don’t play rugby in a howling gale, even though for the Scots that was a balmy early spring day and they really should have beaten England — who, whisper it, are beginning to have a scrum-half problem. Dare we say that Willi Heinz needs more
Q. I am having a drinks party to celebrate the publication of my latest book. I sent out invitations (to mainly long-standing friends) by email. The invitation PDF clearly signals an informal party. Half of the respondents asked their secretaries to send formal replies, which is fair enough, although self-important. But a few secretaries sent
The Yard is a defiantly themed restaurant in Hyatt’s new Great Scotland Yard Hotel, an Edwardian red-brick block which once housed the Central Detective Unit of the Metropolitan Police and its constituent darkness. You have to work hard to dispel that kind of horror, and Hyatt tries: the hotel is extraordinarily lush and over-styled, even
In Arnold Bennett’s Tales of the Five Towns, a young dog called Ellis Carter takes a girl for a drive in a dogcart (a little open carriage pulled by a horse, not a dog, the use of which for traction was made illegal in 1854) on a Sunday afternoon, until the spirited mare he is
