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The RHS Chelsea Flower Show is mere weeks away – the floral spectacular that inspires us all to head out into gardens once again. In May and June a host of British flora comes to life, with dabbles of bubblegum peonies, shocking fuchsia azaleas and the syrupy smell of lilacs in the air. So why not draw inspiration for your own backyard by visiting some of the UK’s best and most beautiful gardens. RHS Chelsea Flower Show, London Rather than confining yourself to visiting one garden, head to this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, which brings together more than 30 – curated by some of the world’s leading landscape architects and designers.

We seem to need little excuse for a party here in the UK, and HRH Queen Elizabeth II’s 70-year shift on the throne is set to be no exception. Whether you’ll be raising a lunchtime gin and Dubonnet to our sovereign’s stamina or simply making the most of the bonus day away from your desk, the Jubilee is the perfect pretext for baking. While you’ve left it a little late to enter Fortnum & Mason’s rather fabulous sounding Platinum Pudding Competition, I urge you not to be deterred from donning your aprons and dusting off your cake tins. F&M’s FAQs reason that a pudding can be ‘steamed, baked, layered or

During last year’s European Championship, England football fans switched, for some reason, from ‘Three Lions’ to ‘Sweet Caroline’ by Neil Diamond (‘so good, so good, so good’). If anything can make them switch back it’s the Football Association, who this week said they were thinking of dropping the Baddiel and Skinner anthem as England’s official song, because it could be seen as ‘arrogant’. Football fans are like children, and as any parent could have told the F.A., if you want to make sure someone does something then just tell them not to do it. The F.A. quickly had to issue a statement confirming there were no plans to change. David

‘Was that Will Smith?’  This was Chris Rock’s characteristically quick and hilarious reaction when his friend, comedian Dave Chappelle, was tackled by an audience member on Tuesday night at the Hollywood Bowl. Comedy venues need to be a sacred space, free from the threat of violence We don’t yet know the motive, we don’t yet know the man’s name, but this is the second high-profile attack on a comedian in two months. Luckily for Dave, he has great security, including Django himself, Jamie Foxx, who helped subdue the attacker, who some reported as being armed with a gun and a knife.  Video footage of the man being loaded into an ambulance

There are moments in life that serve as a wake-up call to adulthood. Perhaps, the first was sitting in the beige office of a mortgage broker, wondering how my soon-to-be-husband and I had made the leap from meeting on a sweaty Durham dance floor to this airless room in Holborn. More recently, it was looking around a primary school for our four-year-old-son. Mindlessly staring at wall displays of woodland animals, you’re racking your brains as to how you will finish work at 3pm for pick up come September and scramble enough childcare for a six-week summer holiday. Goodbye 52-week-a year nursery.  But book yourself enough tours at enough schools, and

I would do anything to help a friend. Need money? A shoulder to cry on? A place to stay? A confidant to confess to? I’m your man. Want me to read your new novel? Forget it. I would do anything for a friend, but as the late Meat Loaf would say: I won’t do that. Sorry. I’ve been there. Read that. And I’ve had enough. Many years ago a really good friend showed me his first novel. It was so bad it left me speechless — but I had to say something. So I did the only thing a good and trusted friend could do: I lied. ‘It’s really funny

You don’t see Waldorf salad so much nowadays. It’s a simple dish: raw celery, apple, grapes and walnuts, tossed in a mayonnaise-based dressing. Although you might still find it packaged in the bigger supermarkets, it’s fallen off dinner tables and restaurant menus alike. We wrinkle our noses at the prospect of combining fresh fruit and mayonnaise: the combination always makes me mentally place the Waldorf salad in the 70s, alongside big platters of dressed salmon, covered in wafer-thin cucumber scales, and a host of other mayonnaise-coated, tricky-to-identify bowls purporting to be salads, possibly involving tinned mandarin oranges. But it’s actually much older than it feels: it was invented in 1896

Is Steve Coogan a one trick pony? It’s a question that has dogged the Mancunian actor’s career ever since his preening Partridge flapped into the nation’s affections over thirty years ago. Since then, with a couple of notable exceptions (his turn as Stan Laurel was a triumph), Coogan’s projects have been little more than variations on a theme but without the genius of the source material. No matter how hard the actor tries to shake off his past with glossy Hollywood fodder, his polyester-pullovered alter-ego is never far from the surface.  It’s not just Coogan’s diffident northern twang or the shifty owl-like eyes, it’s the whole essence of the man – Hollywood can doll

If there’s one company that’s a kind of stock market indicator of the condition of the British middle classes, it’s Lakeland. It specialises in very good household stuff – cleaning and cookware and any number of ingenious gadgets (the catalogues are, I have to say, addictive) – and it has an uncanny knack of registering where popular tastes are going. Its annual Trends report is seized on as an indicator of what normal families are up to, and so it’s proved, on everything from passing trends like the spiraliser (courgette pasta, anyone?) to the inexorable move to recyclables. So, what’s the Lakeland index suggesting now about the British consumer? She