I bumped into Steve Martin dining with Eric Idle at a Beverly Hills boîte, as one does. ‘I really enjoy your Spectator diaries,’ said Steve. ‘And I,’ said Mr Idle. ‘And you and the roller-skating nuns were the best thing in the Olympic finale,’ I chirped back. Hollywood folk love to give each other compliments.
My Turkish never having got beyond intermediate, I always have the same conversation with taxi drivers. ‘Where are you from?’ ‘England, actually I’m a Scotsman,’ I say. Cue suppressed giggles about skirts and whisky from the driver, perhaps a mention of Braveheart. I ask: ‘Where are you from?’ Most taxi drivers in Istanbul are from
For obvious reasons, people are always looking for a nicer word for right-wing. For a while, they tried ‘free-market’ — after all, it sounds spirited and buccaneering — but the 2008 financial crisis left that one holed below the waterline. There was a brief fashion for trying to make the word ‘laissez-faire’ sound attractive, but
I used to spend a small part of every Christmas season worrying that perhaps that year, the particular year in which I was worrying, wasn’t quite as Christmassy as all the others. Generally speaking, I can take all the cinnamon and cloves and ching-chingy shop music you can throw at me, even the colossal seasonal
There are many weird things about Las Vegas, from the truck that drives around offering ‘Hot Babes Direct To You’ to the entrepreneurial hard-up young man on the Boulevard who holds a placard saying: ‘Kick me in the nuts for $20. No joke. No protective cup.’ But the thing I find weirdest is that you
When we looked out of the window last Sunday morning to see thick snow blotting out the Mendip hills above our Somerset village, I’m afraid I immediately thought: ‘The Gore Effect.’ The previous evening, I had been reading how poor Al Gore had belatedly jumped on the latest warmist bandwagon by ascribing Storm Sandy to
What is a real woman? My difficult client, the Australian gigastar Dame Edna Everage, is seriously miffed at BBC’s cancellation of her forthcoming appearance on Have I Got News For You. She flew from Australia especially to record this show, installing herself, as usual, in the Oliver Messel suite at the Dorchester Hotel at her
We sang a hymn called ‘Poble en Marxa’ at the beginning of Mass in the working-class parish of Sant Blai. ‘Marxa’ was not a reference to the bearded prophet of revolution; it’s just the Catalan way of spelling marcha. People on the march. There was a lot of it about. In Barcelona, a million (the
Some time around the middle of the last decade, Japan’s population began to shrink. The disappearing act has continued unabated: at the present rate of decline, this remarkable mono-cultural race will have all but become extinct within a hundred years. Worth a visit then, while stocks last: so I gratefully accepted an invitation from the
Four a.m. Something was triggering the motion-sensor on the outside light. One minute, darkness, the next, a window-full of flailing palm leaves, bright with rain. I blinked for a bit, then remembered: hurricane! There was one on its way, we’d been told by Rudy, the beach barman the day before, a bruiser called Ernesto. But
One of the rites of passage for a comedian is walking through the rain at the Edinburgh Fringe, looking down and seeing one of your own flyers being trampled underfoot. If you want a vision of the Fringe, imagine a boot stamping on a flyer of your own face — for ever. Or until the
The first Saturday of the Hay Festival is always a bit like the first day of term — bumping into people you’ve haven’t seen in months, sometimes for a whole year. Then there are the people down from London, dressed in mufti, sporting inappropriate sunglasses and crumpled linen jackets that haven’t been out of the
