Life

High life

Taki: Wimbledon has changed since I played there

A first-round loser at Wimbledon this year will receive £23,000 for showing up. Back in 1957 I got £80 for losing in the singles qualifying draw and getting into the draws for the men’s doubles and mixed. Call it inflation, if you like, but today’s pros outside the top 100 need the moolah more than

Low life

Low life: Why on earth does a DIY store need a ‘greeter’?

‘Good morning, sir!’ said Wendy: black shirt, green craftsman’s apron. The idea of having a person loitering by the entrance to greet and welcome the customer has spread from trendy California-based clothing-chain outlet Hollister to the DIY megastores. Whereas the Hollister’s fashionable fluffers are nature’s last word on female pulchritude, Wendy’s attraction was that she

Real life

More from life

Long life: I passed a death sentence on two ducklings

My collection of poultry here in Northamptonshire (consisting at present of six ducks and eight hens) includes two little chattering call ducks named Boris and Marina. I called the drake Boris after the Mayor of London, and its partner Marina after the Mayor’s wife. The poultryman who sold them to me said that call ducks

Royal Ascot is not the same without Henry Cecil

For a moment it seemed incongruous reading obituaries in the same week of Sir Henry Cecil and of Esther Williams, the Hollywood star whom most of us only ever remember seeing in a swimsuit amid whirling patterns of leggy lovelies in water ballets. Then I recalled her comment that the only thing Hollywood’s moguls ever

Save skateboarding’s sacred spot

I made my first skateboard at the age of 12 by pulling apart a roller skate and nailing each half to a plank of wood. Less than half an hour later, my mother was taking me to the family GP to have my little toe stitched up. She decided to buy me a proper one

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: Must I work for free?

Q. A man I know has invited me and some other journalists, most of whom I admire, to join him in the Whitehall penthouse of the Corinthia Hotel for drinks and canapés with a view to our contributing to an online magazine he plans to start up. When I asked him what his word rate

Drink

When an economist turns into a winemaker

My friend Mitch Feierstein is a jolly, cheerful, life-enhancing fellow. He is emphatically not one of those economists whose purse-lipped response to any new phenomenon is ‘no good will come of this’ and who have predicted six of the past two recessions. But he is a profound pessimist. In a book he published last year,

Mind your language

Mind your language: Hobson’s choice

An Iranian on the wireless was complaining that disqualification of presidential candidates had left voters with ‘Hobson’s choice’. No doubt this idiom was learnt from a careful teacher, but I wondered how many English people would use it or even know its meaning. All Spectator readers do, of course. In the original Spectator for 10

Poems

Nocturne

Midnight for the squirrels and the drunks, midnight for you dear and your chest hair too, put your pen down pet and rest here. Midnight swallowing the mirror whole, swallowing my mother in her pale blue slippers, and my brother, my big brother in his too small bed. Bed, the longed for stopped short sound

The Wiki Man

Why politics needs more Darwinists – and fewer economists

An ardently left-wing friend of mine is travelling over from Thailand next week to look for a private school for his daughter. My email to him was short. It read ‘Charles Darwin 1, Karl Marx 0’. Nobody among the sharp-elbowed middle class ever allows his political convictions to override the pursuit of a good education