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Ski season is upon us, and with it that familiar dump of status anxiety. Sliding down mountains has always been a rich man’s folly, but only a few years ago, normal people could just about afford to go if they saved hard enough. Not anymore. In parts of France, the cost of a six-day lift pass is just shy of £400. In Switzerland, a pizza can set you back forty quid. That’s just for starters. Factor in the cost of ski hire, ski wear, flights, accommodation, après-ski and mountaintop lunches, and your eyes won’t stop watering. Bring the family, and you’ll need more than a second mortgage. Flights and accommodation

I do not want to dwell on the circumstances, except to say that my phone was stolen and that London is becoming a reeking cesspool of criminality. Perhaps, also, that anyone caught cycling a Lime Bike without a clean criminal record should have the book thrown at them. The result of all this has been a lot of ugly self pity to the tune of ‘why me?’ The worst part was that at the time of snatching, my phone was unlocked, and therefore wide open for fraudulent activity. I disabled all online banking in time, but that didn’t stop the cretin from ordering himself a couple of Ubers and very

The jigsaw is having a moment. Ditto other puzzles, games and brain teasers. Couples engage in post-coital sudoku (apparently). Wordle was played 4.8 billion times in 2023 (the lockdown invention of a young Welsh lad, Josh Wardle). Board game cafes have sprung up in cities. This recent resurgence in the popularity of puzzles is partly a hangover from the Covid pandemic. Sales of jigsaws and board games soared 240 per cent during the first week of lockdown, with more puzzles being bought for adults than children. There are also wider reasons: the so-called ‘homebody economy’ and Scandi-inspired hygge lifestyle craze (think being wrapped up in blankets with a log-burning stove

Watching the Cure’s live-streamed performance of their first album in 16 years, it was hard not to notice the toll time has taken on Robert Smith. At 65, his black spiky hair has long turned into a bedhead of fag-ash grey – a reminder to those of us who have grown up with him that none of us are as young as we used to be. As the slow waltz of the first track of Songs of a Lost World kicked in, and Smith wailed ‘Where did it go?’, it was starting to look like a very gloomy evening indeed – even by the standards of a band hardly known