Gstaad My chalet lies far above the village of Gstaad, but I happened to be ‘en ville’ when I heard the pleasant sounds of an oompah band and saw the Swiss burghers dressed up in their finest Lederhosen marching through. It was a magnificent morning, the mountains glistening in the sun, the air fresh and
Cider was her drink. Pint of. She was a reserved, deliberate, thoughtful woman, aged about 40. She went out hardly at all these days, she said, because she was raising a toddler. On the rare occasion when she did go out, nobody seemed to be having fun any longer. It wasn’t like the old days.
Horses are dreadful hypochondriacs. They also hate work. We may kid ourselves that horses enjoy being ridden. But horses, if truth be told, just want to be left alone to eat. They are willing to do almost anything to achieve this end. Tara, the chestnut mare, has over the years tried every ruse. She once
A few weeks ago, I went to a party at Paul and Marigold Johnson’s house and fell into conversation with Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, a journalistic idol of mine. In addition to being one of Britain’s foremost conservative intellectuals, he was my first proper boss on Fleet Street. He employed me to write opinion pieces and
Sometimes it is all about how you look at things, as was made clear to a clean-living accountant who had helped old ladies across the road, given generously to charity and even found something nice to say about George Osborne. When he shuffled off the mortal coil he found himself sharing a heavenly cloud with
Q. My son works in fashion and he does well, but he still lives at home. I am a good cook so I cook big dinners for him and his friends. When I see these silly thin girls sit at my table who eat hardly anything, I want to let them know that it is
A double magnum is a triumphant spectacle. A single bottle of claret looks slender, elegant: a suggestion of a late Gothic spire. In the 15th century, architects bent their efforts to achieve effortlessness: stone sublimated into light; ethereal, disembodied, breath-taking columns, ad maiorem Dei gloriam, shooting upwards like fireworks to make love to the sky:
‘Lady Day,’ it said in the New Oxford Style Manual (one of ‘the world’s most trusted reference books’, as it said on the jacket), ‘25 May, the feast of the Annunciation.’ Well, it is the Annunciation, but it isn’t in May but March. Of course, one does not look up ‘Lady Day’ in the New
Pojoaque, near Santa Fe, New Mexico This is a magical part of the world — and it’s easy to see why D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Douglas Adams were tempted to hang around for a while. When James Delingpole finally gets his act together and leads 10,000 Spectator subscribers into the desert to form a
