Gstaad By the time you read this it will be mid-January and all your New Year’s resolutions will have gone the way of good manners or mild racist remarks. At least I hope so. Resolutions can be dangerous to one’s health, and definitely a hazard to one’s happiness. Here in snow-covered Gstaad — we’ve had
I was woken by my phone ringing. My boy. ‘What time is it?’ I said. ‘Ten past one,’ he said. ‘How are you feeling?’ This was said with a very obvious and unkind touch of schadenfreude. ‘Terrible,’ I said. I felt as though I might be dying, and the sooner the better. ‘Where are you?’
Is it too much to ask for the machines in my life to stop ordering me about? Am I reaching for the stars in wanting to be loosely in control of my car, my phone and my laptop, rather than me being at their beck and call? I’m not talking about the odd message telling
Since turning 48 last October I’ve begun to obsess about getting old. In 21 months I’ll be 50 and by any definition that’s middle aged. For a man, turning 50 is a bit like turning 40 for a woman. It’s an unwelcome milestone. Adjustments have to be made, humiliations prepared for. One form this obsession
The concept of cheap and cheerful appeals for the obvious reasons: the prospect of something-for-(nearly)-nothing; the assumption that it does exactly what it says on the tin; the lack of pretentiousness — suggesting that its owner is also virtuously free of that forgivable vice — and the freedom from burdensome excess. However, the assumption that
Nobody ever seemed to have a good word to say for Ivan Lendl, though I personally enjoyed his general cool implacability. But why so disliked? It wasn’t as though he stood in the way of British tennis glory: Lendl’s career coincided with headlines that read ‘British Wimbledon hopes extinguished as Jeremy Bates loses rain-delayed first-round
Q. After a beach picnic in Denmark two girlfriends and I went for a walk in the dunes. Returning along the beach we found we had to cross a naturist section. A man made it clear that we must conform and so we did, feeling rather foolish carrying our bikinis — but we had nowhere
I came to the Gay Hussar for gags about the Labour party; to find some wreckage of its glory days. Except the Labour party doesn’t have glory days — only tiny breaks in the blue space-time continuum when a) it isn’t eating itself and b) it manages to convince a country of snobs that voting
Hurrying for the Underground, I thought I saw a poster for a film by Madonna called Wee. It seemed a strange title even for her, and indeed the film turns out to be called W./E., the initials of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII. Nevertheless, wee has suddenly become a frequent word in public utterances. On
