Life

Best life

The Parties of the Year: my verdict 

As the editor’s brief for this column is ‘Fomo-inducing’, I must push the boat out for my debut and am thus nominating my Parties of the Year before the festive season is under way – which is a bit like poor Rory Stewart saying Kamala Harris would win comfortably just before Donald Trump turned every

Real life

The complicated etiquette of the empty train seat

The empty train seat looked inviting, and all three of us stared at it, then looked away, not daring to either take it, or offer it to the other. This train from Clapham Junction to Surrey was absolutely packed. But when someone got up and there was a seat right next to me, I realised

More from life

The glamour of the scallop

There is a gentle irony to the dish coquilles St Jacques: a decadent, rich preparation of one of our most luxurious seafoods takes its name from a saint who has inspired centuries of pilgrimage, and whose emblem came to symbolise modesty. The eponymous St Jacques is St James the apostle, or James the Great. The

Wine Club

Wine Club: captivating Riojas from Mr Wheeler

CVNE – Compañia Vinicola del Norte de España – owned by the same family since its foundation almost 150 years ago – is one of the great names of Rioja and it’s a real pleasure to offer a selection of their wonderful wines, courtesy of Mr Wheeler. They certainly made the convalescing Mrs Ray perk up.

No sacred cows

At 61, it’s official: I’m ‘young old’

I read with some disappointment recently that the Encyclopaedia Britannica considers 61 – the age I am now – to be the beginning of old age. It defines ‘middle age’ as being between the ages of 40 and 60, which means that’s in my rear-view mirror. The only crumb of comfort is that some more

Sport

Who says Test cricket is boring?

Under a dark sapphire sky, tearing across grass as green as a lick of new paint, Mitchell Starc raced in to launch the first ball of the latest Australia vs India Test series last Friday. The murmur from the crowd of more than 30,000 at Perth’s Optus Stadium grew louder with every stride the tall,

Dear Mary

Food

Ideal for winter: The Dover reviewed

For British people, America is an idea brought by cinema, and The Dover, the New York Italian bar and restaurant in Mayfair, meets a version of it. It’s not quite the ballroom in Some Like It Hot, not quite Rick’s Café in Casablanca, but it’s as close as you will find near Green Park Underground,

Mind your language

Is being ‘infamous’ a bad thing?

John Prescott, so Dominic Sandbrook observed last week, ‘infamously exchanged punches with a protestor in full view of the cameras’. My husband has just chipped in to say that it was the best thing he ever did: he’d had an egg thrown at him and responded with a neat left jab. But even if one

Poems

A Pub Wall in 1974

Thinking about those nights    Kindles a strange felicity: Drinking by candlelight     In a pub off the Earls Court Road In the time of the Three Day Week,    Because there was no electricity.   Certainly we were political.    Nothing, though, seemed as serious— Intimate and critical –    As the play our

View

What luck that Sweatenham’shad been flattened, its concrete baseremaining: the perfect spotto sit the works caravan on blocksand our paint shop beside it. Ern and Jud deftly navigatedthe Land Rover around dead tyres,mangled iron, sprouting steel rods,backing it into positionin full view of the Newcastle Street shops and the windows above them,all day traffic to

Witness appeal

Spring cartwheels down these country lanes, knocks fern and dock for six as frost exhumes with petrol fumes tar potholes leaves can’t fix, while bluebells smoke as downpours choke torrentially inside each rainswept flume of beech or broom chiffchaff and finch survive. Here pimpernel bedraggle a grass verge where, windblown, dog violets snitch through hedge

The turf

My picks for Cheltenham and the Twelve

With farmers outraged, the nation’s biggest employers warning the Budget will bring increased prices and lost jobs and growth out of sight, Rachel Reeves has certainly confirmed that economics is the dismal science. It hasn’t got any easier either finding winners. For the previous two Flat seasons this column’s Twelve To Follow showed profits of