More from life

I was slightly sceptical of Team Cameron’s decision to unveil their ‘secret weapon’ last Sunday — namely, Dave’s wife Samantha. Not that she isn’t luminously beautiful. And her ability to juggle motherhood with a high-flying career will undoubtedly appeal to many professional women. Rather, it’s her social provenance that concerned me. Wouldn’t her transparently upper-class

My son Ludo will be celebrating his fifth birthday this weekend with a party at the Build-a-Bear workshop in Westfield. Those of you who don’t have a small child will be blissfully ignorant of this new fad. Build-a-Bear Workshop is a toyshop-cum-factory in which children can construct their very own teddy bears from scratch. The

It’s become an annual tradition, like the first cuckoo of spring. At the beginning of March, when state secondary schools send out acceptance or rejection letters to anxious parents, a New Labour stooge pops up to point out that the majority of parents managed to get their child into their first choice of school. This

Earlier this week I was seriously tempted to call the National Bullying Helpline. Ever since I wrote a blog for the Daily Telegraph questioning whether Alexander McQueen really was a ‘genius’, I’ve become a whipping boy on Twitter, the social networking site. The strange thing is, my chief tormentors are fellow journalists. ‘Alexander McQueen: a

Like many authors, I include an email address at the end of my books so readers can get in touch to say how much they enjoyed them. That’s the idea, anyway. In fact, the vast majority of reader emails I get are requests for career advice. Take the following, which I received a couple of

As someone trying to set up a school, I’ve been doing a bit of research into different pedagogic philosophies. What’s the most effective way to teach child-ren, particularly if they’re not that interested to begin with? Should we embrace an old-fashioned approach, with masters standing in front of blackboards reciting Latin verbs? Or a ‘personalised

It is not just the superstars who make a sport. In cricket the Vaughans and Pietersens win the headlines but it is the gritty Paul Collingwoods, making runs when others are losing their heads, who give the England side character. So who expresses jumping’s ethos? Try Warren Marston. A crowd-pulling name? Maybe not. But Warren

‘The basic principle of English social life is that everyone thinks he is a gentleman,’ wrote Evelyn Waugh. ‘There is a second principle of almost equal importance: everyone draws the line of demarcation immediately below his own heels.’ That was written 55 years ago and today almost exactly the opposite is true. According to a

It is minus two and the paddock behind Epsom’s famous South Hatch stables, still dusted with snow, is bone-hard as the horses circle for inspection by trainer Jim Boyle. Come off on this ground and you could easily snap a collarbone. But there is not a whisper of apprehension. When Wunder Strike, who scored his

As a columnist, I’m often asked whether I deliberately place myself in embarrassing situations for the purpose of furnishing myself with comic material. The answer, regrettably, is no. My life is humiliating enough without me having to court embarrassment. However, when I read that a dating site called beautifulpeople.com had expelled over 5,000 members for

If, like me, you’re convinced you’ll never be truly happy until you’ve shinned up the greasy pole it is easy to forget that not every high-status indicator is desirable. For instance, if I had £100 million my wife’s constant threats to divorce me might actually carry some weight. Then there’s the fate that befell David

I recently received an email from a friend asking if I would contribute to a book he’s editing entitled What Matters Now: prescriptions for a simpler life. ‘A new genre of literature is emerging about the roots of happiness,’ it began. ‘Authors like Alain de Botton, Oliver James and Naomi Klein argue that the materialist/celebrity

Shame has descended on the Young household this Christmas. When my wife picked up our four-year-old from school last week she was intercepted by his teacher who wanted a quiet word. ‘Oh no,’ she thought. ‘What’s Ludo done now?’ In fact, it was more a case of what I’d done — or failed to do.

At the age of 25, the poet and critic William Ernest Henley lay in hospital suffering from an illness that had kept him bedridden for three years. He had been diagnosed with tuberculosis of the bone at the age of 12 and his left foot was amputated just below the knee. He’d just been told

As readers of this column will know, I’ve spent the last year leading the efforts of a 250-strong group of local parents to start a new state secondary school in west London. One of the toughest things about this crusade is constantly having to bite my tongue. As a journalist, I used to delight in

I watched Shadowlands again the other day, Richard Attenborough’s film about C.S. Lewis’s relationship with Joy Gresham, and was struck by one scene in particular. Anthony Hopkins is sitting beside the hospital bed of Debra Winger when suddenly she takes a turn for the worse. He leaps from his chair and runs out into the

It was one of those moments when a clunking great pile-driver comes up and thuds straight into your duodenum. I can weave through the form for a 24-runner handicap at the sputtering fag end of the season. I can summon the maths to cope with a series of cross doubles at, say, 13–8, 11–4 and,