Once again it’s the time of year when Spectator readers start loading up their cars with Andrex, Gentleman’s Relish and Marmite in anticipation of the annual drive to France. Do I have any advice to give? Unsurprisingly I do. For the first hour across the Channel, I quite like to listen to Nostalgie FM. This
A 1980s cartoon from Private Eye shows a teenage boy, dressed in animal skins, staring intently into the dancing flames of a small fire. Behind him, bearded and leaning on a club, stands his scowling Neanderthal father, horrified: ‘When I was a boy we had to make our own entertainment.’ The great Douglas Adams believed
‘Linda works miracles in the kitchen while Trevor is ubiquitous with the cup that cheers.’ This sentence has haunted me for 15 years. It’s from a parody of the typical reader’s review in The Good Food Guide, probably by Craig Brown. I still quote it gnomically when asked whether some restaurant or other is any
Those of you who saw his article a few weeks back will be pleased to hear Kelvin MacKenzie took a remarkable second place in his local council elections. Already the climbdown over parking charges has begun: the cost of a day’s parking at Weybridge Station is suddenly not £5 but £4. It’s the same story
If the climate-change debate has accomplished anything, it has proved people never say sorry. When I was about 12 the families of the people who now wince at every gramme of carbon we burn carried on their cars a yellow sticker reading ‘Nuclear Power — No Thanks’ (on 2CVs the sticker was rumoured to be
My article last week (‘Mad Men are taking over the world’) led me to be accused of elitism by one of the magazine’s online readers. What riled him was my suggestion that, rather than spending £6 billion on speeding up the Eurostar journey by an hour, it might have been better to spend a few
One distinction between the private and the public sector is that the former generally has an incentive to offer customers a variety of levels of service, while the latter doesn’t. That’s why you can get a pizza delivered to your home when you’re feeling fine, but you can’t get a doctor to visit you when
Last summer we picked up a hire car at Inverness. As I was dumping the rental paperwork inside the glove compartment I unearthed a forgotten pair of sunglasses so hideous in design it suggested that the previous renter had been either a porn star or a German, perhaps even both. That he was at least
As you probably know (to your cost), Amazon purchases above a certain value incur no delivery charge. This offer works because so many people buy extra books to lift their order above the free-postage threshold. Predictably, in every country in which the retailer has launched the scheme, there has been an immediate and sustained uplift
There was formerly a rude custom for those who were sailing upon the Thames, to accost each other as they passed, in the most abusive language they could invent… a fellow having attacked him with some coarse raillery, Johnson answered him thus, ‘Sir, your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy-house, is a receiver of
Local newspapaers usually have a slightly dotty reverence for the area they serve. My own local paper recently described Winston Churchill as ‘the former Westerham resident and wartime prime-minister’. The Evening Standard has the opposite problem in that it is a London paper which really doesn’t much like London. In fact it wants its readers
Following last week’s article, someone wrote asking me to dissuade them from buying the new ultra-thin Apple Air laptop, to which they had become curiously attracted. Delighted to help. In fact anything I can do to deprogramme you from the Apple cult will be time well spent. With luck you may end up devoting yourself