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Like most freelance writers, I have a notepad full of jottings which come under the loose category of ‘Ideas I Probably Won’t Get Round To Doing As I Doubt Anyone Will Be Interested, They’re A Bit Rubbish Anyway And It Probably Wouldn’t Pay Much’. Around halfway down this list is a book provisionally entitled A Hard Day’s Fight, in which I espouse my opinions on a plethora of Beatles-related debates, and add a few new ones of my own. So along with my theories that John Lennon didn’t write any good music while he was resident in New York (the Plastic Ono Band and Imagine albums were recorded in the

Every few years, an obituary for the Sloane Ranger appears. In 2015, the Telegraph proclaimed their death. In 2022, Peter York himself, co-author of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, wrote a devastating piece in the Oldie on the ‘End of the Sloane Age’. In it, he cast existential doubt on the species altogether: ‘By 2021, there seemed to be every possible shade of Sloane around in London. But were they really Sloanes at all? It looked as if the only way for a Sloane to succeed was to UnSloane themselves.’  You might think that if York himself had called time, then the death knell must have well and truly sounded. But no. In August this year, York – Lazarus to the last – reappeared in the Evening Standard to detail how reports of the Sloane Ranger’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Sloane Rangers are

Once upon a time, post was delivered by a postman or postwoman. Over the past two centuries, this quaint initiative augmented a sense of community and invested early mornings with at least fleeting human contact. These days, decades after the slow demise of letter writing, a postman is now a rather recherché figure and, thanks to Royal Mail price hikes, a symbol of luxury, despite the downgrading of his once resplendent red and blue woollen frockcoat for a synthetic combo including all-weather shorts. More and more, post – which we’re now encouraged to call ‘mail’ on the principle that all Americanisms are good – means the harvest of our online