Last week, the West London Free School went out with offers to parents who’ve applied for places in September and it’s not an exaggeration to say my phone’s been ringing ever since. The first category of callers are disappointed parents who haven’t been offered places. We had nine applications for every place this year, making
To say that you live in south Northamptonshire doesn’t usually inspire much envy. Not many people dream of living between Northampton and Milton Keynes. But from where I’m sitting at my kitchen table I have a peaceful view over the wide and shallow valley of the river Tove, dominated on the horizon by the handsome
How do you stop children fighting on long car journeys? With three boys aged six and under, not to mention an eight-year-old tomboy, it’s getting to be a serious problem. Every journey seems to end in the vehicular equivalent of a cage fight, in which all four frantically try to undo their seatbelts so they
After a lifetime reporting politics, I am as well accustomed to spin as a washing machine. But a rich new example reaches me from the US. Researching her family tree, a Californian discovered that she shared a great-great-uncle, Remus Reid, with a US senator. Unfortunately, the great-great-uncle was a regularly convicted horse thief and train
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Roxy’s successor As I write this, Roxy, my children’s pet hamster, is spinning happily in her wheel, with nary a care in the world. Unfortunately, it’s not the same Roxy who went missing four weeks ago. That hamster still hasn’t materialised after I foolishly left her cage door open one night. This is Roxy Mark
I was birdwatching the other day with a jolly Methodist minister who had only ever once been to a racecourse. Knowing nothing of the sport, in the first race he had backed an outsider called something like Holy Orders, purely on the name, and collected. He put most of his winnings on The Lord in
As the co-founder of the West London Free School, I receive a lot of junk mail from ‘educationalists’ trying to sell me various bric-a-brac, most of it pretty harmless. Occasionally, though, I get something genuinely disturbing. For instance, this week a publisher tried to interest me in the novels of Charles Dickens ‘retold in a
The American poet Robert Frost wrote memorably of pausing on his pony in the snow and looking longingly into woods that were ‘lovely, dark, and deep’, regretting that he had promises to keep and ‘miles to go before I sleep/And miles to go before I sleep’. In another poem he described a woodland path as
I write this having just returned from the BBC, where I spent a hairy six-and-a-half minutes sticking up for Fred the Shred on Newsnight. Or, rather, attacking the Forfeiture Committee’s decision to strip him of his knighthood. My antagonist was Will Hutton, former editor of the Observer and currently the Principal of Hertford College, Oxford.
He didn’t quite tap the side of his nose but, looking around and dropping his voice, one of the best-connected racecourse informants I know greeted me at Cheltenham on Saturday with the news: ‘Alan King has got the sniffles in his yard.’ Striking a line through all the inmates of King’s Barbury Castle Stables on
Last Sunday, the Observer published a hostile article about the free school being set up in Wandsworth by Katharine Birbalsingh, whom it described as the ‘Tories’ favourite teacher’. As readers may recall, Katharine lost her job as deputy head of the St Michael and All Angels Academy in Camberwell after criticising Labour’s record on education
On Saturday 7 February my wife and I finally succumbed to the combined pester power of our four children and bought a hamster. They’ve been nagging us for over a year to buy them a pet and this seemed like the least hassle. We opted for a six-week-old Syrian with reddish-brown fur and white patches.
Every sport needs renewal and the most heartening thing about this jumping season is the growing prominence of a bunch of comparatively new, comparatively young trainers. A little older than some is the phenomenon John Ferguson. Moonlighting from his worldwide role as Sheikh Mohammed’s chief bloodstock adviser on the Flat, he has set up as
Since turning 48 last October I’ve begun to obsess about getting old. In 21 months I’ll be 50 and by any definition that’s middle aged. For a man, turning 50 is a bit like turning 40 for a woman. It’s an unwelcome milestone. Adjustments have to be made, humiliations prepared for. One form this obsession
The concept of cheap and cheerful appeals for the obvious reasons: the prospect of something-for-(nearly)-nothing; the assumption that it does exactly what it says on the tin; the lack of pretentiousness — suggesting that its owner is also virtuously free of that forgivable vice — and the freedom from burdensome excess. However, the assumption that
One of the most depressing things about being a journalist is that 99 per cent of your work goes unnoticed. You pour your heart and soul into a piece, congratulate yourself on having produced something rather good for once, then wait for the plaudits to start rolling in. Six months later, you’re still waiting. It’s
I am sorry but if anybody else asks, ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’ they are in danger of me dotting them one. I arrived back with Mrs O. from two weeks lecturing abroad to discover that the neighbour to whom we had lent one house key could not find it. The builder holding the
For me, the end of one year and the beginning of the next is a time of mixed feelings. I always take stock, looking back to see what I’ve accomplished in the year gone by, and on that score I have much to celebrate. The West London Free School opened in September, the culmination of
At around this time of year Caroline and I always have the same argument. I’m not talking about who’s going to be ‘tree elf’ on Christmas Day — a humiliation that involves picking up all the discarded paper after Caroline’s four siblings and their children have unwrapped all their presents. I’ve been ‘tree elf’ for