Gstaad Some are whispering that it was the biggest haul since the Brink’s-Mat gold bullion robbery of 1983. Others say that compared with the Graff swag of last week, the Great Train Robbery was a mere bagatelle. Nobody knows nuthin, and while the fuzz are keeping schtum, the on dit is that it was the
On the last day of my grandsons’ week-long visit, Saturday, I was struck by bone pain of an unsurmised ferocity. I reeled around the cave swearing with incredulity. Shoulders, shoulder blade, ribs, the right arm more or less useless. The day before I had looked in the mirror and found a mass on my neck
When we put the house on the market, my environmentally conscious neighbours disappeared on a holiday so long I asked another neighbour where they had gone. ‘On a cruise,’ she said, but I thought that unlikely, because these people have a book on climate change on a shelf near their front window, so how on
I’m currently sitting on top of a brownie point mountain. Caroline has departed for a two-week tennis freebie in Barbados, leaving me holding the fort. I have three teenage boys to take care of and a very small dog. That means getting them up for school every morning, emptying and loading the dishwasher, walking the
Q. My mother is still mentally and physically sprightly at the age of 87. She is perfectly capable of living alone – indeed she has done so for the past 20 years. The problem is that she is still highly social but most of the London friends of her own vintage, some of whom lived
Life is returning to normal. Clinics, pills et al are receding into the distance. There was never anything remotely approaching a crisis, but at moments, life felt like one. A friend had a couple of stray bottles and he felt they ought to be drunk Before Christmas, for which I had other plans that did
‘Slither, slather, sliver, slaver, slabber, slobber,’ chanted my husband from the armchair beside his glass of whisky, to a little tune he had composed all by himself. The occasion for this outburst was a seventh item of slip-slop vocabulary: a newspaper reference to a slice of bread ‘lathered in mayonnaise’. I think it might just
Every day another word slips away I never know it’s gone until I’m lost for it But some days I get one back to roll around my tongue and wonder what exactly it is going to say
Under the lamp of childhood, the atlas of the world is open to the man: his fingers travel continents, stroke the blue seas, cross their blood red lines to America — to that inevitable page, with circles where his father had set down his whisky glass on the Nebraska plain, with pencilled names of strangers
Much of the magic of Curb Your Enthusiasm comes from the show being plotted but not scripted. The direction of the conversation is agreed in advance, after which the cast – mostly stand-up comedians and hence naturally good at extemporising – improvise the lines on the fly. This makes the show engagingly realistic even in
You don’t bounce so easily at 40 and last Thursday, after 25 years, it was one fall too many. Without fanfare or fuss, a fit Tom Scudamore quit the saddle. There will be days when he will miss the adrenaline-charge of driving a horse to victory in the shadow of the post, the thrill of
