Gstaad Mountains in summer are of an astral beauty, the snowy, far away, shrouded in cloud peaks like old men wearing spats. Danger lurks with such men, as it does with mountains. Colin Thubron wrote about a certain peak in Tibet, and claimed that the God of Death dwelled on that particular mountain. One could
I came up and out of the underground station into the busy Brixton Road. It was 9 o’clock on a humid, overcast summer evening. As well as being a bustling place of departure and arrival, the precinct in front of the station seemed also to be a preferred place for the locals to meet and
Luckily, I got The Ridiculous over and done with when I discharged myself from my local hospital in south London. Now it was time for The Sublime. ‘Good evening, madam, and welcome to the Princess Grace. If you would please take a seat for a few moments, someone will show you to your room.’ It
I always thought it was something that happened to other men as they got older, but not me. I was different. Owing to my extraordinary machismo and strength of character, I would not experience this ‘life change’ until I was at least 75 — and at that point I would just take a pill to
Cramming too much in is always a mistake. It was just one broken jar of tahini paste, requested by Italian friends along with the pork pie, the Marmite and two bottles of Amontillado as items unobtainable in Sardinia, but boy what damage it had done after my holiday suitcase spent three hours in the care
Q. This autumn I will be studying in Paris. A friend from Italy will also be studying there and she wants us to share a flat. She is amazing and I worship her but, the problem is that I need to be alone first thing in the morning — and she wants to talk. The
My recent drinking has been straight out of Hopkins: ‘All things original, counter, spare, strange.’ A dinner party in Chinatown ended with mao tai, the Chinese rice spirit. I have never been able to decide about mao tai. It has a nose like a school changing room: some would say, a taste to match. It
On the matter of a referendum (not, of course for British people), the Prime Minister said recently that he hoped the Falkland islanders ‘will speak loudly and clearly and that Argentina will listen’. This seems to me an example of hypercorrect speech, parallel to the tendency of people whose social insecurity overwhelms their grammar to
I have never practised tax avoidance myself. It’s not that I’m particularly virtuous: it’s just I’d rather pay a few thousand pounds to HMRC than spend an hour talking to an accountant. But I was fascinated by the Jimmy Carr affair for one reason. Why was Mr Carr, alone of the thousand or so participants,
