Does absence make the heart grow fonder? I’m not so sure. I’ve been away from London for one year, and was dreading the return. The grey sky, the Dickensian streets, the fat-bellied lager louts, the knife culture, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, the coarsest of the coarse Alan Sugar in the House of Lords: a
Last week I’d had all I could take of the idiotic moral criticism levelled at me by those who profess to love me, and I fled and took refuge in a Premier Lodge. Or was it a Travelodge? I always confuse the two. Even as I checked in I wasn’t sure with which of the
I’m a sucker for insurance. If you are naturally suspicious and inclined to pessimism then insurance is a drug you have no control over. You are either fantasising about how you can get more of it, or else desperately trying to make do with less of it. No matter how you adjust the dosage you
Newmarket trainer William Haggas should be one of racing’s ambassadors to the world. Win or lose he communicates pleasure. Take Triple Aspect’s victory at Sandown on Saturday in the Agfa Listed sprint. ‘He’s a really scrubby little thing and he moved to post like a goat,’ declared the candid trainer. ‘But he’s really genuine and
I would like to take this opportunity to apologise unreservedly to Twitter. Like many of my colleagues, I unfairly characterised it as a vacuous expression of our narcissistic age. In fact, it turns out to be the most effective tool for advancing freedom and democracy since the invention of the internet. In Iran, the anti-government
Q. Like many middle-aged, under-employed people, I have finally got round to finishing my novel. Being too self-regarding to vanity-publish and not, as some West Country nobody, seeing much other hope of publication, I scoured around for friends from university who in intervening decades have laboured their way to the top of the publishing world.
‘What do they mean by the millionth word?’ asked my husband as he turned away from Jeremy Paxman’s houndlike physiognomy and towards his whisky glass. ‘What do they mean by the millionth word?’ asked my husband as he turned away from Jeremy Paxman’s houndlike physiognomy and towards his whisky glass. What indeed? It seems that
Whenever you make an optimistic prediction, you risk being wrong twice. First there is the risk that the prediction itself is wrong: 1,000 Concordes by 1973; flying cars; food in pill form. More often, though, it isn’t the prediction that’s wrong but the optimism that accompanies it. The commonest failing of techno- optimists is to
