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Of course the varifocals I bought online were a waste of money. When they came in the post and I first put them on I could see the world up to and including my fingernails but anything beyond was a blur. I should have guessed that emailing a photo of my face with a credit card fixed to my forehead, as directed, was too rough and ready a guide to the correct measurements. If the glasses had been right it would have been more of a surprise. Being poor is always more expensive in the long run. I’d have been better off spending the £200 on some class As and

I didn’t like it, and then I did like it. But a writer’s job is to tell the truth, as Papa said back in 1942. Hemingway maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing — it takes away ‘whatever butterflies have on their wings’ — but he wrote non-stop about writing, as incisively as any writer ever did. Last week I finished my umpteenth book on Papa, and it depressed me no end. Really. And then, as I was reading the last three pages, I discovered that I did, after all, have a connection with the great Papa. My depression lifted like a fog. Life is one long

Goody goody gumdrops! The Donald has pardoned Lord Black and I couldn’t be happier. Conrad got a bum deal and spent three and a half years behind bars for charges I always believed to be phoney, most of which were overturned. Never mind. One can’t get back the years wasted in a cell for as good a mind as Conrad’s, but one does emerge from the pokey stronger. The Big Bagel Times reported the Black pardon in a manner that can only be described as constipated. Black is a conservative, which is a red flag to envious lefties. But there’s something else. I have spoken to medical experts about the

New York   This is my last week in the Bagel and I’m going to give it the old college try. Two weeks without booze, ciggies or ladies have made Taki a very dull boy. The next seven days — or rather nights — will decide. The Bagel, of course, is not what it used to be, but then what is? I was recently looking at some grand Gotham landmarks, contemplating that they — and I — will not be around for ever. I walked inside the San Remo on the West Side and I was transported to a different era: high ceilings, thick walls, big windows and lots of

New York   Here’s a question for you: if your wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, toy boy even, lied repeatedly to you about a serious matter such as fidelity, would you continue to trust them? I suppose some fools would, but most wouldn’t. So here’s another question: how can the British people even countenance voting for those they entrusted with implementing their 2016 decision to leave the bureaucratic dictatorship that is the EU? Duh! Actually, I’d be in the UK by now and trying to stir things up, but I’m stuck in the Bagel with pneumonia, bronchitis, and all sorts of other bugs that caught up with me while in pursuit

Charlottesville is an enchanting Virginia college town graced by the neoclassical architecture of the university’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. I flew there with two friends, the talented photographer Jonathan Becker and the Vietnam Special Forces Silver Star winner Chuck Pfeifer, all of us close buddies of the deceased. It was the memorial service for Willy von Raab, scourge of drug dealers and illegal immigrants while commissioner of customs for eight years under Reagan. The humorist P.J. O’Rourke and I were the two speakers, and after a rousing ‘America the Beautiful’ we retired for an afternoon of southern hospitality and University of Virginia co-ed watching. This is not woke, I know, but