When I left university, I prepared for a short spell of poverty while I sent off amusing and opinionated articles to newspaper editors who needed the work of smart alecks like me to entertain their readers. My short spell of poverty lasted 17 years. In the meantime, I survived on odd jobs, including a stint
‘Our boys went to Lebanon and trained Hezbollah!’ shouted the drunk Irish lad in the fish and chip shop as an Indian man behind the counter silently fried chips. ‘Chucky ar la!’ the lad shouted, or Tiocfaidh ar la, to correctly spell in Irish the slogan of the IRA, meaning ‘Our day will come.’ And
‘Nothing will surely ever taste so hateful as nursery tapioca,’ wrote Elizabeth David. She’s not alone in her hatred of the stuff: tapioca pudding has become a shorthand for those childhood dishes we look back on with horror. It’s exactly those dishes that I’m trying to restore to their former glory – if such a
I know I keep saying it, but Alsace is my favourite of all French wine regions. Heck, it might even be my favourite in all the world. It has everything: a remarkable history, glorious scenery, chocolate box-pretty towns and villages, fabulous food, extraordinarily fine eaux-de-vie and stunning, smile-inducing wines. Oh, my goodness, the wines. Produced
I’ve just returned from a walking holiday in Northumberland with Caroline and my mother-in-law. I say ‘walking’ but that makes it sound more physically demanding than it was. Billed as ‘gentle guided walking’, it was more like an ambling holiday, and the distances weren’t very great. On the second day, I was anxious to make
Q. How can you leave a party early – e.g. at midnight rather than 4 a.m. – without everyone thinking you are letting the side down? My partner and I really enjoyed a recent wedding of two friends but we had to take a flight to the wedding and therefore had a really early start.
We were talking about Italy: where and when to sojourn. I confessed to so many gaps. It is years since I visited Genoa and I know that the Ligurian coast has innumerable hidden treasures. There are the well-publicised places, such as Portofino and San Remo, which I am sure are pleasant enough out of season.
With surprise, I heard from a Jewish friend that a Hebrew term for a heretic is epikoros, apparently derived from the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 bc). The word cropped up recently in a row over a film on the life of Baruch Spinoza, showing that he is not forgiven more than 360 years after his
Do you remember the feelingof how things appearedwhen you went home earlyfrom school, alone? I had a sense ofthis is how the world iswhen I’m not in it. Hedges and houses seemed new –more themselves, differentto 7.20 hedges, and home-time houses,as though they weren’t expecting me back so soon. Brick and leafbreathed, or seemed tofill
Unlike all their predecessors with their stubs recording new bikes, a week’s holiday in Cornwall or a magazine subscription, your last chequebooks wait in the drawer. Complete, pristine and obsolete, they’ve got no story left to tell. Though that’s a story in itself.
I once heard of a couple who were teachers in their mid-fifties. Having pooled the proceeds from selling both their flats when they moved in together in the 1990s, they found themselves in the happy position of owning a mortgage-free west London house worth more than £1 million. He was originally from Norfolk, and was
