If it’s true that the virus finds your weak spot, it has lodged itself like an evil monkey in my head. After departing from every other bit of my body, it was still in my brain. It told me I didn’t need friends any more. So, as I moped about the house ‘self-isolating’, I sent
I keep pinching myself. After the misery of the last 18 months, things really do seem to be on the up. Everyone I know is double-jabbed, they’re all desperate to carouse and I’ve been out on the toot five nights (and three lunches) on the bounce. Spurs beat mighty Man City in their season opener
George Orwell would not have been surprised by the brouhaha surrounding Kate Clanchy. Two years ago, Clanchy published Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, a non-fiction book about teaching poetry to disadvantaged schoolchildren which was well-received. Earlier this month a group of offence archaeologists on social media started trawling through it for
‘Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers, and — as George Orwell said — old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.’ Thanks to John Major, former prime minister and noted cricket lover, for those words uttered
Q. We have two very longstanding and generous-hearted (female) friends. Both have always been overweight, but since Covid they have ballooned and now are obese by anyone’s measure. On the two occasions when we have hosted them for an outside lunch, they have unknowingly broken one of our metal garden chairs each. It will soon
Browns is a famous fashion boutique in deepest Mayfair. It occupies a curved cream townhouse on Brook Street, which seems sunken and shuttered. Perhaps it is the lingering effects of the pandemic or because it’s late summer, but the interior — carefully designed over multiple eyries over many floors, like gold teeth fallen on a
‘What do they mean, “Guess”?’ asked my husband, staring suspiciously at a page of the Daily Mail that had been used as wrapping for a secondhand book he had bought through the post. He finds old newspapers more interesting than the morning’s fresh issue. ‘Guess the definition: Aleatory (c.1690),’ it said. ‘A) A concealed repository.
Hearing ‘Caravan’ by Duke Ellington and I’m at the Blue Parrot in Casablanca: the house bird perched outside unfazed by whirring ceiling fans, and the belly dancer’s creeping shadow. The band playing jazz to a fluent clientele leave the exotic bird unperturbed. A street market unfolds under her gaze. How simple the menu at Ferrari’s
Taking a day off racing to enjoy Joe Root’s regal 180 not out against India on the third day of the England-India Test — tranquillity interrupted only by a call from home to say that Flat-coated Retriever Damson had eaten the TV controller — I was struck by the amount of ‘gardening’ indulged in by
