Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I often feel as if I know what it was like to be a member of La Résistance in Nazi–occupied France because I have three disco-age daughters. Last week, the call-to-action stations flashed up on WhatsApp at 03.06, just as the cockerels were beginning to crow and the enemy was setting up
‘I want the stairlift to go faster!’ said my mother, as the machine she was sitting on whirred furiously while she moaned to me about it on the phone. ‘How fast do you want it to go?’ I asked, imagining it doing 60mph down the short run of stairs in their little house in Coventry,
A few years ago, a friend wrote a cookery book for the UK market, full of gorgeous dishes, many of them esoterically British. It was snapped up by an American publisher who, as well as converting my friend’s careful metric measurements into loosey-goosey volume-based cup measures, queried a couple of her more British ingredients, one
God, men are pathetic. At least, that’s the view of Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a researcher at Stanford, who has come up with a new term to explain the emotional labour women are having to do to help men cope with their psychological problems: ‘mankeeping’. According to Ferrara, ‘patriarchal masculinity’ stops men from developing ‘emotionally intimate
Q. My husband and I have recently made very good friends with some neighbours in France. They know I am having a 60th birthday party in London and have assumed they will be invited too. My problem is one of these new friends is a world-famous Hollywood actor and his wife is famous in her
‘The nuisance of the tropics is/the sheer necessity of fizz.’ Over the past few days, during which England endured sub-tropical sweltering, it was more a matter of beer. I do not wish to denigrate water, which is all very well in its place. I often drink it. But for urgent, nay life-saving, rehydration, nothing beats
The FT headline said: ‘Man Group orders quants back to office five days a week.’ I didn’t know what quants were and all my husband could say was: ‘Complete quants’, as though it were funny. Of course I kept thinking of Mary Quant, and I suppose her name was French in origin. There was a
There was a train in the distance.Comforting to know the train was coming.Comforting to know it was a long way off. One day I stood on the platformtrying to imagine the train lolloping in.It rushed by and kicked up a wind. And – figure this? – it knocked off my hat.
For the past 25 years I have commuted to London from Otford, a delightful village outside Sevenoaks. I do this in adherence to Sutherland’s Law – not the excellent 1970s BBC series featuring Iain Cuthbertson, but a rule of my own devising which states that you should always travel from the smallest airport or railway
