Life

High life

Low life

Real life

A&E is no place for the over-tens

‘Ouch!’ said the ex-builder boyfriend. ‘I think something’s bitten me.’ And a few seconds after that, something bit me too. We had been walking in the woods with the spaniel, when a winged creature of some sort, or possibly an agile snake, decided to take a chunk out of us both. Within a few hours,

Wild life

The books that have kept me alive

In bed Safety measures — I’ve never been good at them, so inevitably I inhaled and got soaked by the toxic agricultural chemical I was out spraying on a windy day in Kenya. At 49, I’m not worried about triggering distant future tumours — or infertility — and I’m still waiting to pay back on

More from life

Dear Mary

Drink

Mind your language

Poems

Landings

On our anniversary, you drag the sofa-bed   into the old conservatory. The January moon     swells to cliché and under a ten-tog duvet   we shiver. Frost plays havoc with the view. Years slip, sheets cool, the roof weeps and timber withers   in its frame. We are unhinged, the window slides,     the stars keep their distance, and

The Wiki Man

This strategy won Eurovision. It could also save your life

Oskar Morgenstern grew up in Vienna, John von Neumann in Budapest. Clearly the same Austro-Hungarian intellectual spirit which gave rise to Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele and their seminal joint work Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour is still alive in that part of the world, because the Austrians chose a bearded transvestite to represent them