Subscriber only

New York   There is fear and loathing in this city, with men looking over their shoulders for the thought police and hard-eyed women roaming the television studios with lists of sexual predators. There is also dread over the latest exports from the city’s youth detention centres, thanks to Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert Kennedy and ex-wife of Governor Cuomo, who is now busy bailing out criminals who cannot afford bail through the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights foundation, of which she is president. This is one hell of a city. While the criminals are being released, the innocent (presumed) are losing their jobs, having been accused of sexual harassment.

Gstaad   The bells are ringing, the bells are ringing, ding dong, ding dong. The cows are down from up high, where they’ve been grazing since spring. I look at them from my window and they stare back. I love hearing cowbells day and night. Their sound accompanies me as I hit the makiwara. I like it best when the cows cosy up and examine me up close. They have a complete absence of expression: no emotion, no curiosity, serene. The one that grazes just outside my window I call Emily, and she has even more tsuki no kokoro — ‘mind like the moon’ in karate parlance — than the

To London for much too brief a visit: a marriage, lunch with Commodore Tim Hoare, and a look-see for a house. Yes, I am returning to live in London, but under one condition. It’s called Corbyn, and if he comes in, I’ll stay away. It’s rather cowardly, I know, but I did live in London during the closed shops of the early 1970s. I experienced the joys of the three-day week, the uncollected rubbish, the hospitals without electricity, and the unions exercising power over the government until a certain Margaret Thatcher put a stop to it. I find it hard to understand how people can root for Labour when the

One of the most beautiful things to happen in recent years was ‘the conceptual penis as a social construct.’ This was an academic paper which proposed that: ‘The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.’ This gobbledegook was presented in an academic journal, was peer-reviewed and published in Cogent Social Sciences. The only problem was that it was a hoax. A big, beautiful brilliant hoax carried out by two academics – Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay – who had immersed themselves in the academic BS of their time.

The grandest view of Gstaad and the surrounding Saanen valley bar none — and that includes the vista from my high-up-on-the-hill farm — belongs to an imposing house that was originally a sanatorium but is now a home for the blind. It’s ironic that it is located where only eagles dare, but its residents are unable to view the sights. Such are the jokes that fate plays on mankind. I had just finished a very hard training session and was looking up the mountain at the blind people’s home, which looks like a very luxurious hotel from the outside. My heart went out to the poor folks inside, blind to

Moving day. The contents of a hillside shack to be moved four miles to a cave house perched high on a cliff above the village. The cave house’s only access from the road below is a steep, narrow and stony footpath. Three removal men for the job: me plus two French day-labourers. The elder of the Frenchmen, Philippe, was 67. I called him Philippe Phillop because that’s what he wore. He is a patriotic Parisian and his character, I would say, is the Parisian equivalent of a chirpy cockney. The same ready wit, the same cynicism born of urban poverty. He did not, however, find my nickname for him as