Life

Low life

Birds of a feather

Goodness it was cold here last week. I was sitting by the fire reading an old newspaper when a robin flew past and alighted on a framed sepia photograph of my grandfather. My grandfather loved birds: he kept quails and finches mostly, and once he had a tame jay, so it was an apposite choice

More from life

Your Problems Solved | 22 February 2003

Dear Mary… Q. I was driving my wife and children to the Warwickshire countryside. My mother followed us in her car. At a slanted T-junction, I stopped to allow some far-off traffic to pass. My mother, thinking, perhaps, that I was still driving like the boy racer of my youth, accelerated straight into the back

Mind your language

Mind Your Language | 22 February 2003

Mind your language In They Came to Baghdad, a topical-sounding novel by Agatha Christie, the heroine, Victoria Jones, finds ‘all was above board, mild as milk and water…. Various dark-skinned young men made tentative love to her.’ Or so I am told by Mr Bruce Harkness from Kent, Ohio. He also has, on occasion, to