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My sister’s boyfriend is a solitary man and easily overwhelmed by another’s presence. On his rare visits he flits in and flits out again. On this occasion he was making his usual dash for the door when he saw me, remembered something, and handed me two battered old pocket diaries in that offhand, embarrassed way of his. ‘You’re interested in the first world war. I thought you might want to have these,’ he said. ‘If you can make any sense of them, good luck.’ I opened one and saw his surname, Smith, inscribed between the words ‘Gunner’ and ‘248 Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery’. The diary was for 1917. The

Gstaad   Here in Gstaad there is no worker alienation. Nor are the rich especially worried. The talk is about snow conditions, upcoming parties, the price of real estate, Brexit and, of course, socialism, a disease that strikes those far away from this Alpine resort, but has yet to infect any of the locals. I had a long chat with a friend of mine, born and bred up here, who makes his living teaching people how to ski and fixing their television sets after hours. ‘Don’t you ever mind when you see first hand how plush the new chalets are, especially of those like myself who made it the old-fashioned

‘The British political class has offered to the world an astounding spectacle of mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers.’ This is a direct quote from a recent New York Times, a newspaper that is known for being anti-heterosexual white male, anti-Christian, and now anti-British ruling class. Mind you, normally when someone attacks the British I smile. And more often than not I mumble that no one hits the Brits harder than themselves. This time, however, let’s take a second look as to why the venom. Under the headline ‘The Malign Incompetence of the British Ruling Class’, some clown I’ve never heard of takes up half a broadsheet page denouncing Britain’s past in

Asked how he was feeling as he was about to give a speech to a ladies group, Mark Twain, looking stricken, is supposed to have said: ‘How do you expect me to feel? Shakespeare is dead, Goethe is dead, and I have a terrible cold.’Alas, I’m no Twain, but I feel worse than the Mississippi sage ever did — that I’m sure of. Going cross-country skiing underdressed in bone-chilling temperatures didn’t help. I now sneeze about 150 times a day, I’m aching all over, my nose is running as if I had shoved two ounces of Peruvian pure up it, and my head feels as though it is stuffed with

Gstaad   Do any of you know what cisgender is? I just found out. Cisgender is a term that describes someone whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. Amazing, isn’t it, that we now need a pleonasm for saying that someone’s a man or a woman? I sometimes envy my low life colleague Jeremy when I read about his conversations with normal people while living inside a French cave. I can no longer converse with anyone who is ‘with it’ — you know the type, the ones who think you’re a Paleolithic hunter gatherer if you say you’re hungry, what with there being so many famine

Gstaad The funny thing is that I was at school with a man called Ted Widmer, and I recently read that one Ted Widmer is a ‘distinguished lecturer’ at a New York university and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. The Ted I knew was anything but ethical and dressed rather strangely. Never mind. Whether or not he was a schoolmate, Widmer has written a treatise on the year 1919 and called it ‘1919: the Year of the Crack-up’. It’s very good. Basically, he says that what took place in 1919 shaped the world for the rest of the century. One hundred years later,