An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Your starter for ten: who was the last English manager to win the top flight of English football? Treat yourself to a half-time pie and a mug of Bovril if you said Howard Wilkinson, who took the First Division championship with Leeds United in 1992, the final season before the formation of the Premier League.
It was the early evening of 31 October and I was three years old, sitting in the living room with Mum, on the brink of bedtime, when I turned to the corner and a decorative wicker armchair. (It was the 1980s.) ‘Mum,’ I enquired sweetly, ‘who’s that man sitting there?’ Mum, suitably unnerved, asked me
The gardening world is a gentle, friendly place. Rows are rare, with disagreements creeping in softly like moss, not blowing up the way they do in politics. Everyone is quite nice to one another, almost to a fault. Which is why the row over Tom Massey’s AI garden at the Chelsea Flower Show is quite
I’ve been fighting Brent Council over some graves. Paddington Old Cemetery is dilapidated and Victorian and has been classified as a park by Historic England for decades. Only a tiny section of its 24 acres is used for new burials. Without life, cemeteries attract foxes (who mess on graves), and the wrong type of people
Sardinia hasn’t always been the tranquil, picture-perfect paradise of today. The island was once ruled by bandits; its rugged landscape the perfect place for criminals to hide. Things weren’t much better on the coastline: slap bang in the middle of the Mediterranean, the island was an easy target for pirates and was vulnerable to plague.
‘The wines were too various: it was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was the mixture.’ This is the meet-cute at the beginning of Brideshead Revisited. Lord Sebastian Flyte chunders through the window into the ground floor quarters of Charles Ryder. Seduced by these smart shenanigans, Charles proceeds to dump his
Realising that I was one of only two non-Polish women while partying with the youngsters from my local Pizza Express – my home-from-home for a decade now – I had to laugh at myself. How I love my waitress mates; Marta, Polina and Camila have become almost like family, showing up self-funded and shoutily supportive at my
Che Guevara died 57 years ago this month and yet, even now, he remains the epitome of revolutionary cool. You never know when he is going to pop up. I came across him recently in the lobby of a hotel in Kandy in the highlands of Sri Lanka. There he was with that determined, heroic
As Sober October comes to an end and we turn our attention to two months of forced festivities, it might be time to ask ourselves if these month-long periods of sobriety actually do anything. In short, I’ve found the answer is that they do. This year, I attempted Dry January. Why? For one simple reason:
I would normally stay tipping on the flat for a couple more weeks but this weekend’s Newbury and Doncaster cards make no appeal, gambling wise, while the return of a Saturday jump card at Cheltenham is hugely welcome. On balance, I prefer betting on national hunt racing because it’s easier to get attached to the
If cocaine were a perfume, it would be Chanel No.5: a timeless classic impervious to the flux of fashion and taste. It straddles all socio-economic divides, provided you can afford it. When I lived in Spain, cocaine was the recreational drug of choice because it was more widely available than other narcotics, and its grade
Nearly 20 years may have passed, but a good number of people will still recall the exchange between a salt-of-the-earth member of the public, Diana Church, and the then-prime minister, Tony Blair. The year was 2005, the occasion a pre-election edition of BBC Question Time, and the issue at hand? Well, plus ça change –
‘There is absolutely no need for any child applying to our school to be tutored,’ said the headmistress of a prestigious London day school during the Q&A session. Relieved, I left the hall to wander around the booths in a nearby room. I was struck by the many tutoring agencies, offering advice, courses and books
The medics would have one believe that alcohol is a depressant. That may be their conclusion drawn from test tubes in laboratories. Fortunately, however, it bears little relation to real life, which is just as well. The world has rarely been in greater need of antidepressants, in every form. One tries to tease American friends
It’s a bright autumn morning and I’m first through the doors. There are only two shops that can inspire such a disregard for my finances, and the other is Swedish. Today I find myself in Nisbets, and the first rule of Nisbets is not to bring a shopping list. If you’ve not heard of it,
Such an awful lot of stuff is happening right now, even the keenest observer of social trends could be forgiven for missing a statistical milestone passed earlier this month. So here it is: at the beginning of October, it was revealed that, for the first time since the 1970s baby bust, deaths outnumbered births in
When I was in London recently, I arranged to meet some old university friends at the pub. Now in our late 50s, we’re getting quite decrepit. Hair – if we have any left – is grey or greying; waistlines are expanding. We talked about our deteriorating vision and hearing, high blood pressure, dodgy knees. None
Old or young, fat or thin, body-positive or body-embarrassed, man or woman, everyone with money seems to be on a weight-loss drug: Wegovy, Mounjaro or Ozempic (which although a diabetes drug, is so often used off label for weight loss that there have been supply shortages). In the past couple of weeks alone, two freewheeling
‘I love serial killers,’ explained Megan, 29, from Kent. ‘People think I’m weird; my sister thinks I’m going to kill someone.’ She travelled to London for the weekend for CrimeCon, a convention dedicated to true-crime lovers. Here, for the eye-watering price of £700 for the two days, strangers can come together to meet the survivors
English is in crisis. And no, not the sort of crisis caused by signs in supermarkets saying ‘ten items or less’. It’s caused by students hating their GCSE English Language lessons and refusing to continue the subject at A-level. A-level take-up has dropped by 40 per cent since 2012. You might giggle that this just
Across vineyards in England and Wales, secateurs are being sharpened and buckets are at the ready as owners prepare for harvest. October is usually the month commercial vines give up their fruit before being whisked away to the winemaker–cum–alchemist who turns the juice into wine. As a former vineyard owner (I sold up in January)
These days, it’s fashionable to get deliveries of vegetable boxes. Some do it through devotion to the dour idol of seasonality; the true worshipper knows they are buying a challenge. Many great recipes are created to deal with gluts and shortages. Digby Anderson, in his wonderful Spectator food column, pointed out that every good kitchen
Foreign-trained horses are often overpriced when they come on raids to Britain, particularly when they are housed with the smaller stables. This may well be the case again tomorrow when I expect horses from the other side of the English Channel to make their mark on Champions Day at Ascot. Several French handlers will be
‘My name is Love,’ typed the help assistant, ‘and I’m a member of the Airbnb community support team.’ I was using one of those chat boxes, where someone from the company you’re grappling with, embodied in a flashing cursor, interacts with you in print on a live chat screen. I am kind and polite, I
Sally Lunn’s is a teashop in Bath. It sits in a lane by the abbey, and the Roman baths. Paganism and Christianity jostle here: Minerva battles Christ, who wins, for now. Sally Lunn’s calls itself ‘the oldest house in Bath’ (c. 1482). It is rough-hewn, with a vast teal window and pumpkins on display. The pumpkins
There’s nothing more intriguing than a closely guarded secret recipe. Coca-Cola and KFC are two famous examples, with the precise ingredients for the soda syrup and special coating kept in guarded vaults: the story is that those who hold the information aren’t allowed to travel on the same plane in case of disaster. Lea &
Sailing’s very own ubermensch Sir Ben Ainslie has every right to be considered the world’s most competitive bloke. Those who knew him as a teenager say he always had just two ambitions: to bag a sackful of Olympic medals, and to win the America’s Cup for Britain. Well he didn’t have much trouble becoming the
It’s a sunny October morning at a bull-breeding ranch north of Seville, and 82-year-old Frank Evans is preparing to step into the ring. Born in Salford, Evans is one of the few British men ever to become a professional bullfighter, or torero. There is something of the retired rock star about him. He is dressed
As the author of eight non-fiction books, I am most often asked why did I chose to write a particular title. The answer is that my books are usually written out of obsession: to slake my personal thirst for knowledge on the subject in question – almost irrespective of whether the topic would interest anyone