Fabian Carstairs

Why I don’t worry about bad hygiene at Michelin restaurants

There would have been some long and pale faces recently at the excellent Sportsman pub in Seasalter after Canterbury City Council gave it a damning two-star hygiene rating. This much-loved Michelin star pub recently wowed some friends of mine with skate wings and caviar-rimmed oysters. It’s hard to square their delicious meal with the descriptions

Which came first? The egg, obviously

‘We English prefer brown eggs,’ wrote J. B. Priestley in the 1970s, ‘they seem to us to have a more reliable look of rusticity.’ The mottled chestnut shell of a Burford Brown is surely more genuine than the clinical, white-shelled variety favoured by the American market. It’s a charming point, but there’s really no relationship between

Katy Balls, Matthew Parris and Fabian Carstairs

20 min listen

This week: Katy Balls reads her politics column on Keir Starmer’s ceasefire predicament (00:54), Matthew Parris warns us of the dangers of righteous anger (06:48), and Fabian Carstairs tells us how he found himself on an internet dating blacklist (14:29).  Presented by Oscar Edmondson.  Produced by Cindy Yu and Oscar Edmondson. 

The Covid farce

38 min listen

This week: The Covid Inquiry has reached its more dramatic stage this week with the likes of Domic Cummings, Lee Cain and Martin Reynolds giving evidence. But in his cover piece for the magazine Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at the University of Oxford and director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, says that

Help! I’m on a dating blacklist

There’s a online blacklist of men you should avoid dating and I’m on it. I discovered this over the summer when a colleague gave me a nudge and showed me a screenshot of my dating profile. ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’ A wave of fear passed through me. I had been posted on a Facebook group