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Friday

Ruth Bloomfield

Would you rent a John Lewis home?

John Lewis recently returned to its roots, resurrecting its ‘never knowingly undersold’ price-matching promise. But it’s hard to imagine how the company, which opened its first store on London’s Oxford Street in 1864, could apply this undertaking to its latest venture. For, not content with supplying the nation with sofas and curtains, lightbulbs and sewing patterns, John Lewis wants to provide the actual homes to put these items into – dipping its corporate toe into the world of ‘build to rent’, or BTR. The retailer has unveiled plans to construct almost 1,000 rental flats at three company-owned sites – above a Waitrose store in Bromley, south-east London; on a brownfield

Ameer Kotecha

Spare me the truffle takeover

I remember, vividly, when working at Raymond Blanc’s Michelin-starred Le Manoir, the moment the truffles were delivered. A frisson went round the kitchen staff as the napkin covering the precious morsels was dramatically whipped off. Physically inspecting the gnarled, knobbly nuggets was a right reserved for head chef alone. As a lowly pot-washer, I was confined to the back, neck craned for a glimpse. So I am not blind to the excitement and sheer theatre of the treasured truffle. I even like them. But why on earth have they taken over every restaurant menu, as plentiful as lashings of ‘EV’ olive oil and flaky sea salt? 2018-19 was when the

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Make Halloween scary again

It was the early evening of 31 October and I was three years old, sitting in the living room with Mum, on the brink of bedtime, when I turned to the corner and a decorative wicker armchair. (It was the 1980s.) ‘Mum,’ I enquired sweetly, ‘who’s that man sitting there?’ Mum, suitably unnerved, asked me for details about the invisible guest, whereupon I outlined a farmer resembling every description Mum had heard of her great-grandfather. Her great-grandfather was a 19th-century ploughman who worked the fields where our home would later be built. My parents had never spoken of him in my presence. I have no recollection of that night beyond

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The row over Chelsea’s AI garden

The gardening world is a gentle, friendly place. Rows are rare, with disagreements creeping in softly like moss, not blowing up the way they do in politics. Everyone is quite nice to one another, almost to a fault. Which is why the row over Tom Massey’s AI garden at the Chelsea Flower Show is quite so striking. Since the line-up for the 2025 Royal Horticultural Society version of London Fashion Week was announced last week, gardeners have been absolutely and abnormally furious about the first shoots of AI appearing. Massey’s garden promises to be an ‘intelligent’ one, using AI trained on RHS plant data and advice to tell visitors how

Ben Lazarus Ben Lazarus

Will councils soon be digging up the dead?

I’ve been fighting Brent Council over some graves. Paddington Old Cemetery is dilapidated and Victorian and has been classified as a park by Historic England for decades. Only a tiny section of its 24 acres is used for new burials. Without life, cemeteries attract foxes (who mess on graves), and the wrong type of people – drug addicts and drinkers Brent recently launched a rather biased consultation looking at whether off-lead dogs should be banned (my favourite question in the survey: ‘Do you agree with dogs urinating on graves?’). The council claims they have received ‘a growing number of complaints’ from mourners about dogs but won’t say how many complaints.

Tuesday

Tom Goodenough

Sard times: Exploring Sardinia’s secret south

Sardinia hasn’t always been the tranquil, picture-perfect paradise of today. The island was once ruled by bandits; its rugged landscape the perfect place for criminals to hide. Things weren’t much better on the coastline: slap bang in the middle of the Mediterranean, the island was an easy target for pirates and was vulnerable to plague. Life in Sardinia was once truly miserable. Head west from Cagliari and it isn’t long before you’re in a Sardinia that many visitors don’t get to see Thankfully, the pirates and plague are no longer a problem in this part of the world. But there is another ‘p’ you might have to watch out for

Flora Watkins

The debauched posh are back

‘The wines were too various: it was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was the mixture.’ This is the meet-cute at the beginning of Brideshead Revisited. Lord Sebastian Flyte chunders through the window into the ground floor quarters of Charles Ryder. Seduced by these smart shenanigans, Charles proceeds to dump his dull middle-class muckers in order to ‘drown in honey’ (also champagne, Catholicism and plover’s eggs) with Sebastian and his rich Oxford set. By the time I arrived at university at the turn of the century, debauchery had long been democratised. John Lennon had smoked a spliff in the gents at Buckingham Palace, while another working-class

Monday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Where are the small boat babes?

Realising that I was one of only two non-Polish women while partying with the youngsters from my local Pizza Express – my home-from-home for a decade now – I had to laugh at myself. How I love my waitress mates; Marta, Polina and Camila have become almost like family, showing up self-funded and shoutily supportive at my theatrical endeavours over the past couple of years. Now one of them has left to return home, I felt a sense of loss. How odd to see the likes of the Guardian favouring such red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism And to think I used to believe that Poles coming here was a bad idea. Growing up adoring my