Spectator Life

My own episode of Long Lost Family doesn’t involve a hug from Davina McCall or a visit from Nicky Campbell, armed with a box of tissues and the kind of tight smile that tells you that you’re about to cry your eyes out. It begins with an unexpected call from my brother who lives in the United

As we approach the final countdown to the school summer holidays and I am faced with the prospect of lots more quality time with my almost-five-year-old, and absolutely no idea what I will fill the days with, it seems a good moment to evaluate my style of parenting and seek out some advice to help

There is nothing more glorious than an art gallery selfie. In the same way that hearing someone mispronounce Van Gogh lets you know you’re dealing with an autodidact (the best!), so a gallery selfie suggests someone who doesn’t quite belong in that space: someone who is ignorant of the etiquette of the art world and

The Irish problem has existed for centuries, though the nature of that problem is not always easy to define. It used to be political, though relations between English and Irish people on a personal level have usually been harmonious. There are still political problems, because identity – the question of to whom we owe our

The news that Raynor Winn’s bestselling memoir The Salt Path may not have been the whole truth has been met with a mixture of outrage, hilarity and ‘I told you so’. Many readers have smugly informed the world that Winn’s journey along the Salt Path with her husband Moth (Moth!) was so obviously a work

In my first ‘proper’ job after university, selling advertising space for a well-known motoring magazine in the early 1990s, one of the few things that alleviated the utter tedium was the banter. Some of the quickfire repartee was ingenious. We were nearly all graduates, intelligent and articulate. Someone would occasionally overstep the mark, but we

I can’t say I was gobsmacked to read that Miley Cyrus and Naomi Campbell seemed more interested in each other’s company than in their fans when they held a ‘meet and greet’ in London to sign copies of their new single. Some fans complained, accusing Cyrus of ignoring them in favour of chatting with Campbell.

As a child, superhero comics felt like a guilty secret – their devotees part of a secret society who found refuge in the musty, cardboard-scented havens of comics conventions. Back then, girls were absent, dressing up was unheard of, and even children weren’t especially welcome. So when a gang of teenage girls not only turned

Rolling Stone magazine once quipped that grunge was what happened when the children of divorce got guitars in their hands. If you take this theory and tweak it, then one can reasonably conclude that Oasis is what happens when children who grow up in a house devoid of books decide to form a band. The

On Tuesday, as the world teetered on the brink of war in the Middle East, the Financial Times’ front page focused on the possibility that holders of gold from France and Germany were considering moving their investments out of New York due to Donald Trump’s erratic policy shifts and general global turbulence. We are regularly

‘Are you going to Glasto?’ Just the name – in that smug, shortened form – is enough to set my left eyelid twitching, the way it does when I read emails from people who still include pronouns in their signature. ‘Glasto’, trailing the self-satisfied whiff of BBC executives high-tailing it from Hampstead on a taxpayer-funded

Perhaps it’s a sort of Original Guilt – Original Sin’s bastard offspring – that Catholics are born indoctrinated with a sense of the awesome sanctity of church, presumably predicated on the Real Presence. So for us there’s something viscerally shocking when it’s not observed. And yet… I remember being about seven, going to Mass one

I live in a small cathedral city in southern England. The chances of having my mobile phone snatched from my hand by an opportunistic thief, or my Rolex watch wrenched from my wrist by a brutish thug are still mercifully small. But another menace to life and limb has recently emerged here: the mobility vehicle

In the middle of Cairo there’s a place called the City of the Dead. It is a dusty sprawl of mausoleums, sepulchres and crumbling Mameluke tombs, that has housed the corpses of the city for over a thousand years. On a dank winter’s dusk, it feels especially lifeless – deformed dogs vanish into shadows, random

When I was in hospital for almost half a year, learning how to face life as a ‘Halfling’ – a person in a wheelchair, patronised and petted – the thing I looked forward to most was a normal, some would say banal, event. I longed to be in my local Pizza Express, in Hove, reading

In the winner-takes-all world of modern art, there’s every chance you might not have heard of Cedric Morris. Why should you? No matter how much you sweeten the tea, the Welshman, born in 1889, was no Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko or Salvador Dali. Nor from our 21st-century outlook can it be said that the name

Back in 2007, I went to war-ravaged Guinea-Bissau in west Africa to report on its rise as the continent’s first narco-state. Latino cartels were using it as a staging post for shipping cocaine to Europe, bribing its rulers to turn a blind eye. So much product was being landed that local fishermen would catch stray

What’s the most hazardous occupation? Deep sea fisherman? Uranium miner? Tail-end Charlie in a Lancaster bomber (not a career currently available)? I challenge anyone to find a speedier way to meet one’s end than becoming an influencer. The sad death of 28-year-old University of Salford student Maria Eftimova, who tumbled off Tryfan, a 1,000ft mountain

Pop music criticism, said Frank Zappa, was the work of people who can’t write, about people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read. Half a century later and he’s still right. Although pop is essentially a juvenile art form – its clearest strength and most obvious weakness – that doesn’t stop reviewers pumping up

If Frederick Forsyth had not existed, you would have had to invent him. Yet no novelist could have come up with as convivial, swashbuckling and lively a character as the thriller writer, who has died at the age of 86. Many of his millions of admirers thought him almost immortal, and over the course of

I’m afraid that when I read that the posh glamping provider for wealthy Glastonbury fans was going into liquidation, I smirked. The company offered yurts that only look luxurious if you compare them with tents – with a beds, a sofa, a loo and a shower, as well as meals. Pretty basic, biatch. The only

First, a confession. Sometimes I go on a super-geeky site for dedicated weather watchers. It’s probably because I am quite manic depressive – and British – and definitely because I adore warmth and despise dank. That means I can be tipped into doom by anti-cyclonic gloom or lifted into ecstasy by a decent heatwave. Whatever

It was when I saw an entire crate of orange juice exit my local supermarket that I knew something had died. The Artful Dodger school of shoplifting has officially been boarded up, its artisan poachers and pilferers as redundant to the modern world of thieving as swag bags, eye masks and soft sole shoes.  There’s