An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
A few weeks ago I felt it was my civic duty to draw attention to the many grammatical mistakes and spelling errors in the National Trust’s pronouncements. The abundance of howlers seemed to constitute something of an educational hazard: ‘How many impressionable schoolchildren will assume that the phrase “It’s [sic] location is unknown”, published by
Early in the first episode of Holding, an adaptation of Graham Norton’s novel of the same name, a young, ambitious, foul-tempered detective is called to a village in west Cork where human remains have been found. Before handing the investigation over and returning to the city, she spits out her contempt: ‘I’m not spending weeks down
Iona, Angola East of the gulps of cormorants along the Skeleton Coast by the Ilha da Baia dos Tigres, Atlantic mists are rolling in across the Angolan desert. A red, alien sun dips towards the horizon and I’m crouching down on the sand, with my face close to the oldest living thing on our planet.
The English language has immense resources, but the odd weakness. What, for instance, is the translation for ‘Auld lang syne’? We were discussing that profound topic while telling stories about absent friends, recalling the occasional bottle and thinking about Britain. Nick Elliott’s response to grim news was to open a bottle of Mouton Rothschild ’82
Spain is busy with an image update. Thanks to a host of savvy media stories, we’re now supposed to think of Spain not just in terms of package holidays, sangria, and Catholicism but also as chic, romantic, stylishly left-wing – the macho anti-fascism of Hemingway’s Spain updated for the #MeToo age – and devastatingly cutesy.
Snus is a smokeless nicotine product that you insert between your gum and your upper lip. Your saliva soaks into the pouch which in turn releases nicotine, entering the bloodstream without a million tiny pesky tar particulates. In the UK, it is illegal to sell tobacco-based snus, though the non-tobacco variant, also known as nicotine
Before the op, I was going to write a jaunty piece about how getting yourself ready to go into hospital is like getting ready to go to a wedding. Both require new clothes – that is unless you feel confident that your jimjams – dressing gown, slippers and, for goodness’ sake, knickers – are all
I am a procrastinator: a time-waster, a faffer-about, an idler, a vacillator. A self-loathing, self-sabotaging masochist grappling with that mad parody of perfectionism, which leads, instead of efficiency, to neglect, apathy, inertia, distraction, and great pain. It is irrational but irresistible. It is to time-keeping the greatest false economy since the finances of the Weimar
As I leant over to speak to one of my dining companions in a busy restaurant, I felt something shuffle on my knee. I briefly wondered if it was a rat. But it was just a busybody waiter, who had taken my napkin from the table and folded it upon my lap. It was a
How many Spectator readers are aware that tiny Montenegro, that silver sixpence of south-east Europe, so long lost in the jumbled purse of geopolitics, has some of the deepest canyons in the world? Not many, I’d bet – we know the luscious Montenegrin Mediterranean coast, if we know anything. And I’d wager even fewer know
Why do we decide something is not for us? This is a question I’ve been pondering as I’ve got older, and started to take a liking to various cultural products that I’d previously marked down – in some cases, for decades – as absolutely unpalatable. Is this a sign of a maturing, more tolerant palate?
I doubt that Sir Keir Starmer has ever been inside a TK Maxx. I don’t see him, even in his early parliamentary days, hunting and rummaging for designer fashion, or trying on dozens of duds in a bid to find ‘the one’. We know the Prime Minister loves swanky clothes at the lowest possible price
Who honestly has the time or inclination to finish long novels these days? I yearn for a serene period when I can read The Red and the Black or The Raj Quartet each night before bedtime, but I seem to be imagining someone else’s life. When new content, cool and engaging, is flooded onto YouTube
It’s been all of 49 years since a horse trained in Scotland won the Virgin Bet Ayr Gold Cup, one of the classiest sprint handicaps of the season. However, I am hoping that trend ends tomorrow and that a horse in the care of genial Jim Goldie lands the winning pot of more than £92,000.
The NHS uses 130,000 pagers, 10 per cent of the world’s total, and a fraction that slightly increased on 17 September when several thousand of those belonging to Hezbollah exploded. In fact, the NHS, where I work, and Hezbollah share certain problems when it comes to communication infrastructure. A few years ago, I was delighted
The Starmers were supposed to have the moral high ground – at least according to Labour eschatology – and yet we read of their grubby relationship mega-donor Waheed Alli. Alli was given a security pass to 10 Downing Street in return for his money. During the election, he lent Team Keir the use of his
There is always much to look forward to on a holiday with friends in France (the day one supermarket sweep, boules under plane trees, foie gras on demand); but, for me, one of the greatest joys is the hire car. That’s entirely due to my indulging in the niche pastime of driving around in the
For the first 50 years of the corked bottle, there was no easy way to get into it. The combination of cork and a strong glass bottle came together around 1630 but the first mention of a device to open the bloody thing wasn’t until 1681. Cavalier get-togethers must have resembled the teenage parties I
Cloth is opposite St Bartholomew the Great on Cloth Fair. People call this place Farringdon, but it isn’t really: it belongs to the teaching hospital and the meat market and William Wallace who died a famous death here and has only a little plaque in turn. Smithfield embraces the dead. Sherlock Holmes met Dr Watson
I am sure there are beloved British dishes that inspire horror in those from different cultures, that are truly unappealing to the uninitiated. I can quite imagine that the bright green eel-gravy that traditionally accompanies the East End pie and mash could be figuratively and literally hard to swallow for a visitor. Or that our
In the exhilarating event of Somerset managing to sneak past Surrey and being on their way to claim their first county cricket championship since the Norman Conquest – or since Vic Marks was playing – they would owe one of their captains from long ago, an eccentric gentleman by the name of Jack Meyer, a
If King Charles wants a ‘slimmed down’, low-calorie royal family, we can thank Queen Victoria for bequeathing us the plus-size version. Responding in horror to the antics of her naughty uncles, who raked about being unsuitable and having mistresses, she set herself and her nine children to public duty and procreation: go forth and multiply,
I grew up in the America of the 1960s, an era renowned for its kaftan-wearing hippies, its ethos of free love and hallucinogens, and demos against the Vietnam War. This was something that caught the imagination of my two London-born, English sons, once they were old enough to have acquired some knowledge of recent social
Getting to Genoa is quite a schlep and, unforgivably, like a spoiled child, I got grumpy. The only direct flight is from Stansted and who the heck wants to travel from Stansted? Nobody. Especially those of us who live in Brighton. So, Mrs Ray and I flew from Gatwick to Milan Malpensa, took a train
The backlash against plans for a Gail’s bakery in Walthamstow made me think about my own experience of gentrification. When I moved to my suburb of Bristol nearly 20 years ago, it was still a largely white working-class area. It was also a temporary home to many of the students from the local university. It
She looked up at me imploringly from the simmering pavement as the sun beat down on one man and his dog in Seville. ‘You haven’t peed yet, Amaya, we need to walk on a bit more,’ though I realised the injustice, as we were both so dehydrated neither of us had much chance of fulfilling
As an 11-year-old, I tried to persuade my mother that we should sell our Victorian farmhouse in the Wiltshire countryside and pour every penny into a brand-new 212mph Jaguar XJ220, which cost £435,000 at the time. We would simply live inside this low-slung two-seat supercar, parked up in a lay-by with a washing line hung
In Cambodia, everybody is looking forward to Bon Om Touk. If your Khmer is a bit rusty, this means the mid-autumn New Moon Water Festival, celebrated in late October. This fervent, noisy, firework-banging festival has multiple, colourful meanings. For a start, it marks the end of the endless summer rain – which turns everyone’s laundry
Few franchises have the cult-like devotion of Harry Potter. One only has to watch the video of hordes of adults counting down the arrival of the Hogwarts Express at King’s Cross, and their fury when it didn’t arrive, to understand the religious fervour people feel for the wizarding world. Yet one announcement did come last