The British are notoriously cheap when it comes to wine; the average bottle price is around £6. On one wine, however, we’re happy to spend five times that: champagne. We love champagne, and champagne producers love us: Britain is their biggest export market and it’s only getting bigger: up by 4.5 per cent last year.
Last year, I found a pair of trainers in our communal recycling bin: Nike Air Max in black and grey size 10, very smart and hardly worn. I’d been wearing them a week when the teenager who lives in the flat below pointed at them and laughed. He told me that he’d discarded them because
On Saturday at Mont St Michel, the 103rd edition of the Tour de France begins, and the favourite to win is again British. As a long-term cycling fan, even typing those words gives me a frisson. When I started watching in the 1980s there were few British riders to cheer on — and none challenging
When we said we were thinking of moving to Lewisham four years ago, the locals in our pub in Bethnal Green thought we were mad. ‘It’s fuckin’ ’orrible,’ one of them said. Coming from people who’d lived all their lives in the East End, this was worrying. Nevertheless, swayed by a cheap ex-council flat, we
Spring is here and the air is alive with the sound of sweaty manmade materials rubbing together, as middle-aged cyclists fill every road, dressed head to toe in Lycra. They whizz along, jumping red lights, weaving in and out of the path of trucks, screaming at pedestrians and taxi drivers; barely evading death three times
There were moments while reading this sprawling, ambitious novel when I thought I was reading a masterpiece. But at other times, it felt as if the author was convinced that she was writing one. The Sport of Kings is the story of the Forge family of Kentucky. They’re a brutal lot. In the opening scene,
There’s a certain kind of Englishman who falls hard for Los Angeles. Men such as Graham Nash, who swapped the Hollies and rainy Manchester for Joni Mitchell, David Crosby and Laurel Canyon. The LA of beaches, semi-rural hills and freeways can work wonders on an English heart. But the city has another side — a
Last month a friend invited me to lunch at the Garrick Club. As an impoverished writer, I don’t get many offers like this, so the week before, in a state of anticipation, I took my good suit out of the cupboard to check it wasn’t too rumpled. To my horror there were two holes the
There’s a moment in a child’s life where Christmas begins to lose its magic. Once lost it cannot be regained, but as adults we can catch glimpses of that wonder through our own children, through booze, and most of all through songs, films and stories. Christmas is the one time of the year when it’s
In a recent book review, the historian Norman Stone wrote: ‘Maybe the second world war can now be left to novelists.’ Perhaps he was thinking of Allan Massie’s 1989 masterpiece A Question of Loyalties, an utterly convincing portrayal of a man making all the wrong choices for the noblest reasons in Vichy France. It’s such
It was eerie the first time I watched The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin because it all felt so familiar. Suddenly my parents’ baffling banter made sense. When I thought they were speaking gibberish they were in fact quoting Perrin. My mother would say ‘great’ and my father would say ‘super’. My father would say things like
‘When he’s away, the thing he misses about Porto is the tripe.’ I was talking to Eduarda Sandeman, wife of George Sandeman, chairman of the eponymous port firm. Despite his illustrious name, George Sandeman isn’t from Oporto (as the British call it). His family are from Jerez and he was educated in England. He speaks
One of the great jokes of the wine trade is: ‘Have you ever confused Burgundy with Bordeaux?’ ‘Not since this morning!’ A few weeks ago, I realised it isn’t a joke. I’d been invited to take part in the Varsity Blind Wine Tasting Match. It’s sponsored by Pol Roger champagne and they thought it would
We (the English that is) share our patron saint’s day with the Catalans. On Sant Jordi’s day Barcelona fills up with bookstalls and flower sellers. The men give their women flowers and the women their men books. I lived in Barcelona a few years ago and found the whole thing charming but also a bit sexist.
Music and booze go together. Just think of Keith Richards in the 1970s with his Jack Daniel’s. There’s the love affair between hip-hop and luxury French booze: Busta Rhymes wrote a song called ‘Pass the Courvoisier’. And think of Puff Daddy and his Cristal champagne, though he later changed his name to P Diddy and
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_30_Oct_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Henry Jeffreys and Sarah Coghlan from Movember discuss wackiness” startat=1491] Listen [/audioplayer]At Glastonbury in 2000 I noticed two young men both wearing enormous Y-fronts and carrying an even bigger pair with the word ‘pants’ written on it. They both looked miserable as you would if you’d come up with the idea while drunk
I think I might be a bad parent; whenever my wife is out, I plonk our two-year-old daughter in front of the television. The other day we watched a rainbow nation of children marching around the British countryside singing ‘Let’s make sure we recycle every day’, and I realised that something has changed in children’s
I’ve just received my latest energy bill and it appears that I’ve been living this last year in a draughty manor house rather than a three–bedroom ex-council flat. This winter, I’m going to have to choose between a warm flat and decent-quality booze. Of course it’s going to be the booze; I’ll just have to
It has become a commonplace fact, beloved of pub quizzes, that an Englishman, Christopher Merret, invented Champagne. There is even an element of truth to it: Merret gave a paper to the Royal Society in 1672 outlining how to make wine fizzy. But he wasn’t the first to induce bubbles in a bottle. In the
For 14 years only one man has cut my hair. Actually, that is not strictly true. Last year I went elsewhere and I felt like a husband visiting a prostitute for the first time. It made me realise how attached I’d become to my barber, Kyri, a Greek Cypriot with a shop in Kensal Rise.
