I once heard of a couple who were teachers in their mid-fifties. Having pooled the proceeds from selling both their flats when they moved in together in the 1990s, they found themselves in the happy position of owning a mortgage-free west London house worth more than £1 million. He was originally from Norfolk, and was
Ask any estate agent: most potential house buyers arrive with a detailed list of criteria for their new home, only to end up buying a property which meets almost none of them. The same is true of dating – few of us are married to people chosen on the basis of an initial checklist. Henry
Business travel isn’t quite the perk it is cracked up to be. For one thing, you have no say about where you go or when (New Yorkers are rude about London weather, but their own city is uninhabitable for four months of the year). Even when the weather is perfect, you often have no opportunity
Rob Henderson is justly famous for coining the phrase ‘luxury beliefs’. These are opinions which are unshakeably held irrespective of any countervailing evidence, either because the display of such opinions confers status on the holder, or else because adherence to them is an article of faith among some social or professional group in which you
I’ve always thought working in hospitality is like getting a free MBA – but one rooted in the real world rather than theory. So it didn’t surprise me to discover a brilliant business idea in a book about the restaurant trade. In Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect, star
I follow the YouTube postings of a maverick young economist called Gary Stevenson, author of The Trading Game. Whatever you think of Gary, he is absolutely right about one thing. Economists, by using what are called ‘Single Representative Agent’ models, have taken a dangerous wrong turn. Such simplistic models, which contain the convenient but absurd
A few years ago, my old school magazine featured a pupil’s brief account of a geography field trip. Before the magazine was mailed out, someone had noticed a jokey reference to a minibus being driven erratically after the teacher had visited the local pub, and worried that this might be libellous. The school could have
This column nearly didn’t happen. Just as I sat down to write, disaster! My dishwasher lost its connection to the internet. This meant I could no longer view real-time feedback about its water consumption on the app. Nor could I start my dishwasher remotely from my office, timing it perfectly so it would be ending
The discourse around ‘flexible working’ has degenerated into a narrow debate over whether people come into the office on three days of the week or four. But this risks distracting us from a more interesting question: do people work better in parallel or in series? When the pandemic hugely accelerated the adoption of video-calling, many
I was leaving the car park of my local shop yesterday – a manoeuvre which involves a hair-raising reverse on to a busy road – when a thought struck me. ‘There’s no chance anyone would get planning permission for a shop here today.’ Either someone from the council would declare there was no safe vehicular
One of my favourite cartoons shows a couple sitting in luxury at the front of a plane, the wife peeking through the curtains to the cabin behind. ‘I’m so glad we’re in business class, darling,’ she says to her husband. ‘There seems to be some sort of hijacking happening in economy.’ People who have learned
Late in the evening six months ago, my wife and I were driving back to our hotel in the dark when we came upon what looked like an abandoned service station. Since it was entirely dark, we assumed it was closed. This was annoying as we needed milk and some other groceries and it was
I had a friend whose approach to entrepreneurialism was to take two separate things that seemed stupidly popular and somehow find a way to combine them. He thought karaoke was ridiculous; his friend thought 24-hour rolling news channels were daft. The two of them created a 24-hour karaoke channel in Asia – and sold it
The Romans never invented the stirrup. What we call a ‘chest of drawers’ was unknown before the late 17th century – before which time you had to store your valued possessions in a deep coffer or chest. The doorknob did not exist until 1878. The tea bag was invented by accident in the early 20th
There are many, mutually reinforcing causes of the property crisis: it is too easy to borrow; there are too many people; there aren’t enough houses; what houses do exist are in the wrong place; and many houses have the wrong people living in them. Solutions exist to all of these, some of which involve building
The legendary music producer Rick Rubin once asked me why I had never moved to the United States. The answer, I think, comes down to an important trade-off: quantity of earnings vs quality of consumption. Historically, once you had a job, there was a limit to the lifestyle choices you could make Whereas the United
As the joke goes, there are two ways to become a top judge. You can study law at university, then enter one of the Inns of Court as a trainee barrister, before embarking on a period of pupillage. If all goes well, you may be called to the bar. Play your cards right and you
In electing this government, we seem to have picked the worst of both worlds: higher taxation combined with austerity in the public finances. The one bonus I had hoped to see from a left-wing regime was a healthily indulgent approach to spending. Instead we get a Chancellor of the Exchequer who is a former Bank
If I had my life again and was asked to choose a superpower, I’d like to come back as one of those people who can enjoy crowds. As superpowers go, I acknowledge this isn’t all that rare, given the bizarre popularity of events such as Glastonbury, or the widespread compulsion to buy Oasis tickets. But
First Fred West, now Lucy Letby. At this rate, it won’t be long before Herefordshire has produced more serial killers than it has miles of dual carriageway. You might assume growing up in one of England’s loveliest counties would make people placid, but then you haven’t spent half your life stuck behind a caravan on
