‘You should be pointing at things with an umbrella for a living,’ said my brother. He’d come to visit me in London and we’d been wandering the West End. The rain never appeared, but my umbrella seemed a natural implement with which to indicate the sights we passed. The Odeon Leicester Square, for instance, where
Who first thought of grinding up all those little unused odds and sods from an animal carcass and stuffing them into a bit of intestine? Many people, apparently. Sausages are one of those products which, while seemingly not intuitive, emerged independently all around the world thousands of years ago. As far as we can tell,
I wasn’t supposed to understand Potato language. It was my parents’ speech device employed when wishing to discuss certain apparently secret subjects in front of my brother and me. While chewing over some esoteric topic, they would suddenly lapse into Potato language, a.k.a ‘P-language’ or just ‘P’. Being a young child, the subject matter didn’t
Pope Leo XIV has announced, though not in the form of a bull, that he will be sharing the Apostolic Palace not just with God, but with flatmates. (Being American, he probably refers to them as ‘roomies’.) While this might seem an odd move for God’s Vicegerent on Earth, even the sacrosanct precincts of the
Why are you enjoying a bank holiday this month, as opposed to a ‘general’ or ‘national’ holiday? It’s because the man who invented them knew that employers might be tempted to ignore titles which were vague. But if the banks were forced to close, trade would become impossible. That man was the Liberal MP Sir
Punctuation is a gendered thing. I’ve been trying to stop myself overusing exclamation marks and it’s been difficult. Exclamation marks are girly because they’re a way of taking the sting out of what you say; they make any pronouncement seem more tentative, less serious. They’re the equivalent of a disarming smile, the marker that says:
It’s humiliating to admit that at 37, I can’t swim. I’ve spent most of my life embarrassed about not having a skill familiar to most children. It’s not as though I can blame never having had lessons. I did. Each week, with my nine-year-old classmates, I would trundle off to our local leisure centre in
In our electronic age it hardly comes as a surprise that Pat MacFadden’s Cabinet Office intends to do away with the use of seals on most official documents, such as grants of patents to inventors. Old-fashioned wax seals, hanging from the bottom of parchment documents, may be seen as cumbersome, but most sealings nowadays consist
The news that the Palm House at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, will begin a £60 million, five-year renovation in 2027 brought back to me a slew of memories from 1978, when I worked there for several months. The extraordinary fame and innovative nature of this unique Victorian building, with its curvilinear, cruciform shape, designed
William Shakespeare was the first to feature, in 1970. Alan Turing was most recent, in 2021. But the Bank of England is now asking whether anyone else should appear, ever. The Bank’s redesigning our bank notes and wants the public’s thoughts on replacing the famous people who currently grace them with buildings, animals, films, historical
Never make a drunken bet. At about 3 a.m. one fateful morning, pre-pandemic and several bottles down, a friend and I made a wager on the outcome of the 2020 US election – he for Joe Biden, I for Donald Trump (who, at the time, looked like a sure thing). Then came lockdown, spiralling inflation
Worse for drink, and lonely in his Hollywood apartment, F. Scott Fitzgerald sat down to write a postcard. He began, ‘How are you?’, an important question as he was planning to send the postcard to himself. Although he never sent it, perhaps he understood the magical ability of the postcard to cheer us up. They’ve
‘You asshole,’ was my friend’s cheery greeting when we met in Ludlow. I’d mucked up the time. Reconciled, we walked to his place and on the door was a note he’d left me, scrawled on a card with an image of him mimicking Philip Larkin proudly sitting on a border stone: ‘Just a note that
I once heard an American complain that, being married to an Englishwoman, he was regularly baffled by the contents of his kitchen cupboards – salad cream, Ambrosia custard and Robinsons barley water. It was ‘like industrial processed food but from the Shire’. It is probably this quality of baffling foreigners that allegedly enabled drug runners
Published in Britain for at least 330 years, lonely hearts ads are now a rare sight – driven to the brink of extinction by the rise of dating apps. This is a pity. ‘The personals’ were a voyeuristic delight. Even if you weren’t looking for love, you still read them. They could be tragic, comic,
I felt a mixture of annoyance and relief when I bought my first non-disposable Elf Bar last weekend, ahead of the disposable vape ban. Relieved, because to all intents and purposes, the new vape is identical to the old one. It looks the same, tastes the same and costs the same. The only difference is
When heading to China on a business trip, I was somewhat bemused to be warned about the banquets I would be attending. Do not sit next to the host, I was told. I was to find out why. Learning the rituals of banquets is an essential part of doing business in China. I was treated
Afriend of mine was once delighted to get a job at the Radio Times, where he ‘corrected’ a golfing picture caption to ‘Steve Ballesteros’. Typos, literals or misprints are often committed in an effort to expunge them. Pity the poor subeditor who blanked out the wrong half of the word that is conventionally printed as
There are few phrases more terrifying than ‘men’s fashion’. It reminds me of yuppies in salmon-coloured jorts on their way to play padel; Hackney mullets; white polo shirts worn by blokes who bathe in Joop!; Olly Murs and the era of the trilby; the Peaky Blinders aesthetic. Men’s fashion has now brought us another monstrosity,
Ringo Starr is mostly known as the second or third best drummer in the Beatles. But for me – as for many children of the past four decades – he will forever be the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine. This week marks 80 years since the publication of The Three Railway Engines, the first
