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You could be forgiven for thinking you’d walked into Oz: in the past couple of years, the whole world has gone green. Pale green, to be precise. Suddenly, pistachio is everywhere: it’s in our pastries, our chocolate, our coffees, our puddings, and even showing up in perfumes, paint charts, scented candles and on our fashion runways. Where has this sudden lust for pistachio come from? In one way, pistachios are old news: they’re an ancient crop that has grown in the Middle East and been used as an ingredient in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cookery for as long as can be remembered. They’re even referred to in Genesis: ‘Take some

You can’t get a Pegu in Rangoon any more. That may not sound like a disaster for the ages – nothing, say, compared to the ongoing chancellorship of Rachel Reeves, MP for Blankstare-upon-Derr – but it is quite telling, once you know the background. To explain, the Pegu is a cocktail. Here’s the recipe, if you fancy making one: Sounds nice, right? Well, maybe not if you’re in Blighty shivering under 3°C and an overcast sky (why on earth would you do that?), but if you’re in Rangoon sweltering under 33°C cloudless skies, as I am, then this sounds utterly delish. Refreshing, icy, boozy, tart, bittersweet, mmm. And so it

One of my favourite dad jokes – and, since I became a father, I have many – is to respond to the question ‘How did you sleep?’ with ‘I lay horizontally in a darkened room with my eyes closed’. But it has never been that simple for me. All my life I have suffered from insomnia. Something that should be easy – newborn babies can just about manage it, after all – has become the hardest thing in my life. I’ve lost jobs because of it, and relationships: you feel like you are cut off from society. That’s one of the most annoying parts – most people’s response to the

Anyone of a certain age is aware of the urban legend that links Marianne Faithfull, a Mars bar and Mick Jagger. But Marianne’s death yesterday at the grand age of 78 (given her lifestyle, how did she get that old?) really does remove one of the last living links with the golden age of rock and roll in its wildest youth. For Marianne embodied every cliche associated with rock excess: the lover of three of the original five members of the Rolling Stones (Mick, Keith Richards and Brian Jones), she also took on David Bowie, but had the good sense or taste to reject the amorous advances of Bob Dylan