Elon musk

Bolting down the back hallway, I realised I was running away from the guests. I shut the door marked private and collapsed on to the dirty old dog sofa in the boot room. ‘You’ll never guess what I’ve done,’ I texted the builder boyfriend who was in London. ‘Left the yard hose on,’ he texted back, for I often risk emptying the well when I’m on my own by forgetting to turn off the stable yard tap after topping up the horses’ water at night. ‘No. Worse. The French people arrived and I hadn’t heated the water. You’ve got to get it on a timer,’ I said, attempting to blame

The online speed awareness course cost £101, or a few pounds less if you didn’t want to book ‘flexible’ so you could change it if something went wrong, which it was bound to. Quite how companies like the AA, which deliver these courses, divvy up the spoils with the police I have no idea. I don’t want to know. I just want to be left alone once they’ve all got what they want out of me. Naturally, when I logged into this course at the appointed time I couldn’t get the camera working on my laptop. Obviously, I had to phone my IT guy and he had to get me

Hypochondriacs are never happy because we know that eventually all of us are vindicated. As Spike Milligan said on his gravestone: ‘I told you I was ill.’ In fact, he had it engraved in Irish: ‘Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite.’ Another one was Alan Clark, who for years listed symptoms – including the merest twinge – in his diaries, along with sentiments to the effect that he knew something would turn out to be serious one day and eventually, at a fairly respectable age to get to, it did. These people are my heroes. They know of what they speak. ‘It’s a two-tone mole!’ I screamed, as I

After running all the errands I could to help my parents, a letter from West Midlands Police arrived. They were throwing the book at us because I’d been caught doing 40mph in a 30 in my parents’ car. The photo evidence showed their little silver Peugeot being driven by me on a dual carriageway in Coventry. A dual carriageway. In what world would anyone think they should be driving slower than 40 on a dual carriageway? I was bringing the car back from its MOT, having been asked to please sort this out by my father as one of a mountain of things he had let pile up since becoming

Is the ‘Cathedral’ about to fall down? That’s the name given by the right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin to denote the 21st century’s most prestigious intellectual institutions, particularly in journalism and academia. He’s talking about the BBC, CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. But we can enlarge the definition to include nearly all the West’s high-status institutions and professions. One of the mysteries of the Cathedral, he says, is that the people in these power centres seem to be members of the same cult-like religious movement – the Great Awokening, Wokus Dei – even though there’s no Holy See

The pilot of the Black Hawk told me I could recline the seat if I wasn’t comfortable. ‘Oh, great!’ I said, and started fiddling with the rock-hard thing I was strapped into, looking for a recliner handle. ‘Not really,’ he laughed, and his square jaw barely moved. When I say square jaw, I mean he had the squarest jaw of any man I had ever seen. He looked like a cartoon character. I had not realised men could really look like that. I felt a fool. Of course the seat didn’t recline. I was strapped into a Black Hawk because I was on a press trip with Gordon Brown to

‘Oggy oggy oggy!’ shouted the Italian flight attendant over his intercom, and all the hen party ladies on the plane squealed with delight. I’m a nervous flier, so as I strapped myself into my seat I was already hyperventilating. It was not ideal that I was sharing my flight from London to Cork with a hen party and a head steward who was acting like he was off his rocker. The blonde girl in the seat next to me was giggling and shouting to her friends, and jumping up and down in her seat. I was about to tell her she really was going to have to stop doing that