London

Roger Scruton writes in today’s Daily Telegraph, a sentence that in itself fills me with a sense of Wa – harmony, order. He writes: ‘Whether or not our political class has the ability or the will to control immigration, we have to accept that many of the millions who have come to this country in the last two decades are here to stay, and will need to be housed. Without a massive expansion of the housing stock, prices will continue to rise and the pressure on planning laws and infrastructure will become increasingly difficult to manage. As a result we face a question that concerns every resident of Britain, and

Somerset House, a handsome Georgian palace on the Thames, was once the office of the Inland Revenue, and the courtyard was a car park, but that particular hell is over. Instead there is Skate at Somerset House with Fortnum & Mason, which is a purple-lit skating rink next to a ‘pop-up’ shop or ‘Christmas arcade’. This, because all PR copywriters think they write for Jennifer’s Diary in 1952, is apparently ‘the most chic and complete Christmas experience in London this season’. I doubt it. There is, for instance, no sign of Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, Father Christmas, or rogue elves, although there is a ‘twinkling 40ft Christmas tree hand-picked from the

Head upstairs. That’s my tip for thirsty play-goers during the interval. Most West End theatres are sunken affairs built in scooped-out craters, and this quirk of their design places the stalls 20 feet beneath the earth’s crust (hence the belly-rumble of Tube trains that wakens sleepy-heads during Twelfth Night or The Winter’s Tale). So the stalls bar is invariably a cramped dungeon with flock wallpaper and a ventilation system that pipes fresh air in from the Gents. Up a flight or two, you’ll find lightness, space and perhaps a view. But it seems that bunkers are now the first option of theatre architects. The Old Vic’s basement bar has been

Mousehole is a charming name; it is almost a charming place. It is a fishing village on Mount’s Bay, Cornwall, beyond the railway line, which stops at Penzance, in an improbable shed; I love that what begins at Paddington, the most grandiose and insane of London stations, ends in a shed. The Spanish invaded Mousehole in 1595 but Drake’s fleet came from Plymouth and chased them away; nothing so interesting has happened since; just fishing, tourism and decline. Now there are galleries and restaurants and what the Cornish call ‘incomers’ buying cottages, in which they place ornamental fishing nets after painting everything white. (For something more ‘authentic’, you can visit

The furore over Jonathan Jones’s criticism of ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’ (or the Tower of London poppies, as they’re more familiarly known) has been both understandable and unsurprising, an early foray in what promises to be a four-year-long argument over how best to commemorate the dead of the First World War. Jones’s article caused outrage by condemning the memorial as ‘prettified and toothless’, symptomatic of ‘the inward-looking mood that lets Ukip thrive’. It didn’t help that the original article (Jones has since published a further defence of his position) gave a supercilious and rather unpleasant account of the people who had come to see the installation: loftily, Jones

Do fish have loins? Last Tuesday, in a pretentious restaurant, I ordered a ‘loin of sea trout’. It looked just like an ordinary piece of fish — a bit small, as is usual in pretentious restaurants — on a plate sprinkled and drizzled as though the chef had perhaps coughed over it rather violently or vigorously scratched his head before giving it to the waiter. In Australia, I was once offered a shoulder of some other fish, so I suppose one might even be able to enjoy a rump of whitebait or even a saddle of flounder. But generally speaking I don’t mind loin when applied to the loinless, and