An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
‘Are you going to Glasto?’ Just the name – in that smug, shortened form – is enough to set my left eyelid twitching, the way it does when I read emails from people who still include pronouns in their signature. ‘Glasto’, trailing the self-satisfied whiff of BBC executives high-tailing it from Hampstead on a taxpayer-funded
I’ve been having this recurring nightmare recently that involves James Corden. The year is 2045. Society has collapsed and London is under quarantine. There is no transport in the city, so survivors get around on foot – though, for some inexplicable reason, TfL workers are still on strike. I live in a bin and survive
Last year one of the big oil companies informed its employees that they had to disclose any ‘intimate relationships’ with colleagues. I remain grateful that my employer has not yet asked me to do the same, because I’m not sure I could survive the embarrassment that would ensue. I don’t just enjoy ‘intimate relationships’ with
I have been in charge of a pizzeria in St John’s Wood for less than a year and already I feel misanthropy taking hold. Most notably, a complete disdain for the general public; I used to think I hated them, but now I can confirm that I definitely, really, hate them. Service is the heart
Perhaps it’s a sort of Original Guilt – Original Sin’s bastard offspring – that Catholics are born indoctrinated with a sense of the awesome sanctity of church, presumably predicated on the Real Presence. So for us there’s something viscerally shocking when it’s not observed. And yet… I remember being about seven, going to Mass one
In her 1954 essay ‘The English Aristocracy’, the author Nancy Mitford popularised the descriptions ‘U’, i.e. upper-class or aristocratic, and ‘non-U’, to denote household terms. Although she did not coin the phrase (that credit belongs to the otherwise forgotten linguist Alan S.C. Ross), she brought it to wider public attention. When her friends John Betjeman
There’s not one thing I don’t love about the street in Hove where I live, with the sea at one end and the restaurant quarter at the other; if I had to fetishise a non-sentient thing, like those women who ‘marry’ rollercoasters, I’d be kinky for my street. (‘Avenue’, rather.) One of the lovely things
Having spent more than half my life living in Scotland, I found weather was probably the most common topic of casual conversation with colleagues. This is because Edinburgh, where I worked as a physician, is freezing for 11 months of the year, and Glasgow, where I was a consultant anaesthetist, rains for the same period.
I live in a small cathedral city in southern England. The chances of having my mobile phone snatched from my hand by an opportunistic thief, or my Rolex watch wrenched from my wrist by a brutish thug are still mercifully small. But another menace to life and limb has recently emerged here: the mobility vehicle
Farmer’s markets are a very cheeky wheeze and we all know it. Their promise – getting back to peasants’ basics of veg yanked from the ground – carries a hefty premium compared to supermarket food, which actual peasants have to buy. Indeed, supermarket food, from veg and fruit to eggs and cheese and bread, is
My main fancies for Royal Ascot this year have all run in the first three days and the final two days look a lot harder to me in terms of finding good wagers. Winning money from the bookmakers is hard, giving it back to them is easy. I am therefore going to approach today and
Our homegrown wine was, until fairly recently, regarded internationally as a bit of a joke. Peter Ustinov could quip that he imagined hell to be ‘Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine’. Likewise, Lord Jay, serving as a diplomat in Paris, recalled the British ambassador rubbing up against resistance from the home side – let
A new documentary is to be screened later this year celebrating 50 years of everybody’s favourite 1970s sitcom The Good Life. I will not be joining in with the festivities. During the two-hour show, 85-year-old Penelope Keith, who played the irascible Margo Leadbetter, will revisit some of the original locations, including Kewferry Road in Northwood,
At first glance, today’s Britannia Stakes handicap (5 p.m.) at Royal Ascot looks an impossible puzzle to solve. No less than 30 three-year-old runners are due to line up and plenty of them are plot horses that will go on to win off much higher official marks than they are running from today. However, my
I once heard an American complain that, being married to an Englishwoman, he was regularly baffled by the contents of his kitchen cupboards – salad cream, Ambrosia custard and Robinsons barley water. It was ‘like industrial processed food but from the Shire’. It is probably this quality of baffling foreigners that allegedly enabled drug runners
‘Same old boring Sunday morning, old men out, washing their cars.’ So begins the punk anthem ‘The Sound of the Suburbs’ by the Members. There are plenty of cars being washed (and waxed) on my road on any Sunday morning and the strimmers are buzzing, despite this being peak breeding season for insects. But here’s
An inquest into the Derby in the Oakley household was to be expected. Mrs Oakley, who bets about as often as you will hear Liz Truss say ‘I’m sorry: I got it wrong’, called me at Epsom this year asking for a fiver each way on Lambourn. Since the ten-time Derby winning trainer Aidan O’Brien
The Grade 1 Prince of Wales Stakes at Royal Ascot today (4.20 p.m.) is an intriguing contest in which five of the nine runners are priced up at 6-1 or less. Los Angeles and Anmaat will renew their rivalry from the Tattersalls Gold Cup at the Curragh last month when the former beat the latter
In the middle of Cairo there’s a place called the City of the Dead. It is a dusty sprawl of mausoleums, sepulchres and crumbling Mameluke tombs, that has housed the corpses of the city for over a thousand years. On a dank winter’s dusk, it feels especially lifeless – deformed dogs vanish into shadows, random
‘Poundland sells for a pound’ is one of those stories of which sub-editors dream – not to mention the beleaguered company’s PR department. But irony aside, the news does draw attention to a paradox: why do discount stores seem to suffer more in bad economic times than they do in good times? It’s like Ratners,
What does it mean to be a ‘pseud’? I hadn’t thought a great deal about it, until a passage from a piece I’d written about semicolons made it into Private Eye’s venerable Pseuds Corner. It appears just after a conversation between two AIs, and above a breathless quote from Meghan Markle (for it is she).
The two staying handicaps on day one of Royal Ascot – the Ascot Stakes and the Copper Horse Stakes – are always among my favourite betting races of the week. In both of today’s races, I first look out for a horse that is well handicapped on the flat compared with its hurdles form. Willie
Today, I go to Ascot. The last time I darkened the turf of the Royal Enclosure was in 2017, when I was heavily pregnant with my first daughter. In the photograph of my husband and me that day, I resemble a whale with a plate attached to its head, while my husband looks as if
My parents both had false teeth. My mother had all her teeth taken out one winter afternoon. I can remember her huddled by the electric fire with a small bowl of blood beside her, mourning their loss. It was a loss not just of teeth but of youth. She can’t have been much over 40.
One of the most memorable dinners I ever had was about 20 years ago, at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Fitzrovia called Pied à Terre. It’s still going, and indeed remains a stalwart of the city’s fine dining scene, but what I especially remember, rather than the food or wine, was how deliciously louche an experience
When I was in hospital for almost half a year, learning how to face life as a ‘Halfling’ – a person in a wheelchair, patronised and petted – the thing I looked forward to most was a normal, some would say banal, event. I longed to be in my local Pizza Express, in Hove, reading
The Lake District isn’t really meant to be about eating. It’s about walking and climbing and gawping. The guide one carries is not that by Michelin but Alfred Wainwright, whose seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells turns 70 this year. Food is mainly to be consumed from a Thermos rather than a bowl, and
In the winner-takes-all world of modern art, there’s every chance you might not have heard of Cedric Morris. Why should you? No matter how much you sweeten the tea, the Welshman, born in 1889, was no Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko or Salvador Dali. Nor from our 21st-century outlook can it be said that the name
Back in 2007, I went to war-ravaged Guinea-Bissau in west Africa to report on its rise as the continent’s first narco-state. Latino cartels were using it as a staging post for shipping cocaine to Europe, bribing its rulers to turn a blind eye. So much product was being landed that local fishermen would catch stray
