Life

High life

I loved prison

Memories for me are like beautifully edited copy: all cleaned up and retaining only the good parts. The wife tells me that I’m quite lucky in choosing to remember just pleasant things, and of course I agree. Actually it’s not really a choice; it is almost automatic. Bad things are tucked away immediately, never to

Low life

I rather enjoy my chemotherapy sessions

With a French health card everything is free for us cancer patients, even taxis to and from the hospital. ‘This is the longest taxi ride I’ve ever taken in my life,’ I said to last week’s driver, Virginie, on the outward leg of our three-hour round trip to the hospital at Marseille. ‘Your poor French

Real life

Our East Sussex house-hunting nightmare

The two-acre smallholding lived up to its name in being very, very small indeed. We had to squeeze around the front door one at a time to get into the entrance hall, which was also the front room and the entry to the stairway. It was a red-brick semi in a row of cottages on

Wine Club

Wine Club 18 September

We had the first of our new season’s Spectator Winemaker’s Lunches last week and what a rip-roaring, shirt-popping success it was. Held in the Jacobite Room of Boisdale Belgravia (our extremely congenial temporary home while the unfortunate flood in our boardroom dries out), it featured the extraordinary wines of Joseph Phelps Vineyards in California and

No sacred cows

Has Boris Johnson given up on free schools?

For the founders of the West London Free School, of which I was one, last Thursday should have been a moment of great pride. We gathered in the assembly hall, surrounded by the politicians and officials who’d helped us, to celebrate the school’s tenth anniversary and reflect on what we’d achieved. Not only has the

Spectator Sport

The other winner of Emma Raducanu’s stunning victory

Not many people would have seen that coming. I’m talking of course of last Saturday evening and the women’s final at the US Open. Who would have guessed what the lady did next? She sat down and wrote Emma Raducanu a letter. OK, it probably wasn’t the Queen who wrote it. Some flunky would have

Dear Mary

Food

Dining in nowhere: Bar des Prés reviewed

The residents of Mayfair are misnamed: they do not really live here. They live in Mayfair like I live on the A30 roundabout near Morrisons or in dreamland. I am sometimes on the A30 roundabout near Morrisons and sometimes in dreamland but only -sporadically. It would be ludicrous to suggest that either is my permanent

Mind your language

Why do ministers – and bakers – love a rollout?

I was rolling out some pastry that had been cooling its pudgy heels in the fridge when voices on the wireless began discussing whether Priti Patel would roll out ‘controversial new tactics to turn migrants back mid-Channel’. I felt that our rolling roles belonged to different realms. For pastry, I have a rolling pin. How

The turf

My Arc de Triomphe tips

The emphasis may all be on speed horses these days, with breeders interested only in horses that struggle to get a yard more than ten furlongs without the aid of a horsebox. But I remain a devotee of the St Leger, the last and longest of the English Classics run at Doncaster over a mile