New York Living a life of pleasure is fun, but it can also become tiresome. Living an ethical life of responsibility is beneficial to the soul, but also boring. I am stuck between the two at times, and I think age has a lot to do with it. A constant reminder of the very visible
After two nights at Le Grau-du-Roi (the King’s Pond) and a night spent within the medieval walls of Aigues-Mortes (Stagnant Waters) we drove north-west to our Remainer friend’s castle perched on the bank of the river Lot. Then duty called her and Catriona returned to Provence and I stayed on for a week to try
‘You coming to help us poo pick?’ said my friend Terry, in a desperate sounding voice message. The builder boyfriend and I were lying in the garden having a well-earned sunbathe on Sunday, his only day off. Meanwhile, as we full well knew, the builder b’s fellow livery customers were hard at work shovelling horse
Order today. I’ve been banished upstairs. Mrs Ray has turned our ground floor into an art gallery in which to show her and her friends’ paintings, prints and pottery during Brighton’s annual Artists Open Houses, and I’ve been told not to come down and talk to visitors ‘or otherwise spoil things’. What can she mean?
Five years ago, I put my friend Nell Butler in touch with Katharine Birbalsingh, Britain’s most outspoken headmistress. I was hoping Nell, who runs a TV production company, would persuade Katharine to let ITV make a documentary about Michaela, the free school she opened in 2014 and which she’s led ever since. I was director
The timing of Brendon McCullum’s appointment as England’s Test match coach couldn’t be better for him, or for the matey but very canny Rob Key, cricket’s managing director. Had they taken over their jobs when England were at or near the top of the world rankings, things would have been a lot tougher. Getting to
Q. I’m 28 and lucky enough to own a four-bed house in Notting Hill. I let three of the rooms to friends. One of these now has her boyfriend over regularly. It was fine when he just stayed the night occasionally but he is now omnipresent and even brings his dirty washing over. The boyfriend
I should know better than to visit restaurants assembled as if from disparate bricks, like thrift-shop Duplo: but the ever-credulous person sees the world anew each day. I thought Arcade, a glass restaurant on New Oxford Street, which somehow manages to be worse than old Oxford Street, might have some of the drama of the
‘It’s not as nice as it looks,’ said my husband, not leaving time to look it in the mouth before wolfing down the lemon and sultana Danish that I had thoughtfully bought him, reduced on account of its age. ‘Every day in this store,’ the till at Marks & Spencer’s had told me in a
when an unexpected whirl of wind tosses grey veils of rain across the Common; gobbets of roof-tile moss and mud plop on my doorstep. The parakeets, no doubt bewildered, flung among new-leafed trees, are blown to destinations never planned for. Flowers I planted yesterday fight for their lives in sodden borders. The sky turns dark.
Come, pop -ology of psych, Beam yourself into us like Headlights through lightheadedness. Come, nanny of nanny states, Come, hour of our hourly rates, Come, heart of our heartiness. Consolation of a prize, Soothing sight for see-sore eyes, Sooth, and say, some truthfulness. In developments a rest, In first worlds a second
It was the largest mass of wood I saw Stacked on a siding, clambered on by weeds, Parts drooling pitch or tarmac long before Someone had laid them there like water reeds Cut for a roof; and as for rafters, these Were sawn too short, and far too chunky, piled Up like an ancient
