It always amuses me at this time of year to observe the fuss people make about quitting booze for a month. Because three years ago, after three decades of taking cocaine on a daily basis, I gave it up overnight. Over-eating, gambling, shopping, pornography — there’s no cheap thrill that can’t be mastered with a
It took three hours for cabin fever to set in. Last Christmas, snowed in at the Oxfordshire homestead, my brother Ed and I, cooped up, cross, snappish, reverted to childhood squabbling. There’s a photo on my phone of Ed’s dog Rags standing at the kitchen door looking mournfully through the glass. We did let her
St Martin’s really did once stand in the fields, just as nearby Haymarket was a market selling hay. But the church has moved with the times. In 1924 it hosted the first ever religious service to be broadcast live. You might have expected Westminster Abbey or St Paul’s to get the nod, but neither wanted
Perched on the edge of the Medway about 15 miles from Rochester is the Isle of Grain, a mass of wild marshes and pastures and great industrial infrastructure. Redshanks, curlews and egrets circle and dive around turbines, tunnels and tanks. The enormous chimney of the gas turbine power station stretches up into the enormous sky.
A new play, Switzerland, which opened in the West End this month, seems to have demonised Patricia Highsmith once again. I cannot quarrel with the overall impression given by the diligently researched biography by Andrew Wilson, but merely say that as one who knew and liked her over many years, the picture seems unfairly partial.
All roads lead to Rome, the saying goes. Well, all roads except for the Roman road of Watling Street, which at one end takes you to Dover (Dubris) and at the other Wroxeter (Viroconium) in Shropshire. I was always only vaguely aware of this thoroughfare but the name began, in recent years, to nag on
My wife and I have a set routine after landing back at Gatwick. We collect our bags, clear customs and are reunited with our car (Meet and Greet parking is by far the best value for money and avoids an hour or so of inhaling a mini-cab’s ‘vehicle deodoriser’). Then we head for the McDonalds
J. A. Baker, an arthritic and short-sighted birdwatcher from Chelmsford, compared the British wilderness to ‘the goaded bull at bay, pierced by the lance of the picador’. Baker found solace in the unblemished solitude of the Dengie Hundred, where he wrote one of the strangest and most influential nature books ever written, The Peregrine, which
The first time I encountered Morwenstowe on Cornwall’s north coast I was alone. It was early spring and the church wore a fresh skirt of primroses. As I crossed the stone stile next to the lych-gate, the churchyard inclining before me, I glimpsed beyond the sturdy grey church tower a triangle of greenish blue, a
It’s a very fitting place for a magic shop. Hidden away in the maze of pedestrian tunnels that lead from Covent Garden to Charing Cross station, Davenports certainly takes some finding. But that’s to the good — a complete absence of passing trade means they no longer have to stock stink bombs and novelties, as
When I mention to people that I have written a book about home bars, the most common response is, ‘my parents/grandparents/swinging uncle used to have one of those globe cocktail cabinets’. The other thing they mention is Only Fools and Horses. For years, having a bar in your home was seen as the height of
In Thomas Mann’s astonishing novel The Magic Mountain the indolent young Hans Castorp visits his brave, terminally ill soldier cousin at a sanatorium at Davos, high in the Swiss Alps. Intending to stay three weeks, he remains seven years. A dubious diagnosis of light tuberculosis is all the excuse he needs to dismiss ‘the flatlands’
Bernard Ingham once told a story about a reporter from the Financial Times who went to cover an election in Ingham’s hometown of Hebden Bridge. The reporter went into a café and ordered a cappuccino. ‘Nay lad,’ said the waitress. ‘You’ll have to go to Leeds for that.’ Ingham told that story to illustrate the
Who was the second prime minister? Everyone knows Robert Walpole was the first. Firsts get all the fame and glory. But what about the poor seconds, elbowed into the shadows of history? Isn’t it time they were given some love? Step forward, the Earl of Wilmington, PM from 1742 to 1743. Let us celebrate the
‘I’d like a copy of the Times,’ said the visitor from the south. ‘Yesterday’s or today’s?’ the shopkeeper asked. ‘Today’s, of course.’ ‘Come back tomorrow.’ Life on Unst has its idiosyncrasies, but personally, I blame the weather forecasters for giving the nation the impression that the place may not even exist. Their London-centric maps of
Cannock Chase is the long, low range of hills that’s visible to your right as you drive north up the M6 beyond Birmingham. If you’ve travelled by train between Euston and Crewe, you’ve practically brushed its cloak. Soon after Rugeley the landscape closes in, and a palisade of dark pines presses down the slope before
Battersea Power Station once generated nearly a fifth of London’s power. It must have hummed and clanked almost as much as it does today while its transformation proceeds noisily. Graphic prints of it are two a penny across the capital, but I’m fond of them because the power station is my near neighbour. I still
I’ve flown only three kites in my life. My stepfather bought me the first. I remember seeing him from a window approaching our little mews house off Bond Street, clutching it furled in its packet as though his life depended upon it. The previous day he had overcharged an electric plane sent for my birthday
The great grey river stretched into the horizon. The sun was big and low in the sky. The air was very fresh and the clear sky streaked with smears of pink and orange. We had only a little left of the day. From our spot on the Globian Sluice, a steel grating promontory, we could
You know where you are with a British street name. I don’t mean literally. I mean there’s a tacit humility to our islands’ hodonyms: they are short, simple and unpretentious. Not for us the long-winded commemorations of national heroes or local worthies: no Avenue du Révérend Père Corentin Cloarec or Burgemeester Baron van Voerst van
