An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
After a while you forget: was I up for Portillo, or had I gone to bed? I think I’d gone to bed. Abbott, Boateng and Bernie Grant, in bed, I definitely remember that. And Powell, accordingly, out. Was that – what? – ’87? What even was that? 1997: where the hell was I? 2010? That
When I was a small child, my mother left me in the charge of an elderly neighbour so that she could write. My grandmother lived far away in Scotland and no formal childcare existed. Still, my mother wanted to write. In bald economic terms, you could say that she was trying to rejoin the workforce
Q. Often at parties strangers bear down on me looking excited and are then offended when I don’t recognise them. This is because I have never actually met them – they have just seen me on television and made the mistake of thinking we know each other. To say ‘I think you’re confused because you’ve
An old friend phoned. Normally cheerful, he was fed up. One of his business partners was being more than usually incompetent. ‘I told him that I’d describe him as a halfwit, if I could find the half.’ We went on to discuss another couple of friends, both good men and true, who seem doomed to
I’m writing this in my car, laptop on knees and a delicious can of Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla gin and tonic in the drinks holder, while my sons are at cricket practice. It’s an inclement evening, but were it a sunny summer’s day, the Yummy Mummies would be sprawled around the boundary in their Veja
Just after Andy Murray made the winning pass that won him Wimbledon for the first time in 2013, he looked up to the sky in pain. Not laughing with joy as Djokovic does when he wins a slam or weeping graciously as Federer did before he quietly put on his Rolex, but a sheer plea
Labour appears to be planning to make housing a big priority for its first weeks in power, which is perhaps unsurprisingly, given that it will have gained power thanks in part to the growing number of frustrated young would-be homeowners. We are being led to expect a housebuilding bill within three weeks of Keir Starmer
Naples is dirty, noisy, haphazard, and full of kamikaze scooter drivers. It is also sensual, liberating, and jolly. But that doesn’t seem to appeal to many people today, who prefer everything to be ordered, measured; all uncertainty removed. In city form, it’s known as Singapore: unlike Naples, everything there is clean, tidy, and works. It’s
Europe is revolting against the tourist invasion. This summer, Venice has started charging a tourist tax to keep visitors at bay. Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera have just set up inter-island protests under the slogan, ‘Let’s change course – let’s set limits to tourism’. Barcelona is planning to ban Airbnb. In the Cinque Terre, on
Sabrina Carpenter first emerged in 2014 as a child actress on the Disney Channel. From there, she signed with a record label, becoming yet another entertainer to take advantage of the tween-TV-to-music-charts pipeline (see Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez et al). Ten years and five average albums later, she was known only to a
Anyone visiting the small Westphalian city of Münster in north-west Germany may notice three man-sized cages hanging from the handsome St Lambert’s Roman Catholic Church in the city’s main square, the Prinzipalmarkt, and wonder about their provenance. The cages are one of the last visible relics of an episode in which society took leave of
I am sitting in a little bar overlooking the jaunty marina of Trinité-sur-Mer, on the opulent south-east coast of Brittany. My Kir Breton is cold, fizzy, sweet and rubescent. Everyone around me is swigging Sancerre and cidre as the sun slowly nods below the green, southerly Celtic hills. The water glitters, the pretty people parade,
Steve Cotten is standing to be an MP in this week’s general election. He has also been called ‘Britain’s grumpiest pub landlord’ by the Daily Mail, the Mirror and the New York Post. In truth, Steve, 64, isn’t grumpy. Not often, anyway. He’s eccentric, certainly, but kind, generous and good humoured, and dedicated to his
Every few weeks, an attention seeker – er, truth seeker – raves to a media outlet about what they experienced when they were ‘clinically dead’. In last week’s Daily Mail, it was the turn of Julia Poole, a 61-year-old ‘spiritualist’ from Cornwall, who suffered an overdose at the age of 21. Poole, who describes her
Stuttering England aside, it’s been a great Euros so far: the comedy of Scotland, the tragedy of Croatia, the miracle of Georgia. Now that the knockout rounds are upon us, I intend to see every remaining game live in full. This is when the memorable moments will begin in earnest, in these win-or-go-home games: last
Unless I am being kept in the dark, Spectator Life has no intention of following the lead of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in scrapping their regular racing tips. That said, those sacked are usually the last to know – even when they are paid to predict the future. Kelvin MacKenzie, the legendary former editor of
I live north of the river in London and my parents live south of it, in the Tunbridge Wells. I have long been a registered user of the Dartford Crossing for fear of forgetting to pay to cross – and thus incurring an automatic fine. This means that the cameras at the bridge and tunnel
I belong to a generation of foreign correspondents whose first move, on entering a hotel room, was not to turn down the bed or to check (hopefully) for hot water, but to examine the phone, screwdriver in hand. Could you detach it from its socket? Could you open it up to get at the wiring?
Older Japanese women are boozing more than ever, according to a new survey conducted by Tokyo Metropolitan Government. The study found that while binge drinking by men decreased over the last ten years in all age groups, the percentage of women in their 40s, and especially those in their 50s, drinking dangerous amounts of alcohol,
Whenever I think of steak tartare, I can’t help but remember a heartbreaking passage in Nigel Slater’s memoir Toast. Slater, working at a French restaurant in a Midlands hotel as a young man, is desperate to try the steak Diane. He books a table there for himself and a date. In a moment of madness,
Say what you like about Gary Lineker, and plenty do, but he’s a terrific presenter and when he’s not running it, Match of the Day dials down a notch. If he wants to bang on about the language of Suella Braverman and 1930s Germany, well it’s a free country – though elsewhere you might find
Steve Coogan confessed in a recent interview on BBC1’s The One Show that he is morphing into his alter ego Alan Partridge. ‘There’s almost a complete overlap in the Venn diagram,’ he admitted, ‘by this time next year I will have completely become Alan.’ Maybe he was joking, but I suspect he kind of meant
Michael Vaughan has been through hell, twice. The first time was well publicised. On thin grounds, the former England cricket captain was accused of racism and was then subjected to a brutal investigation by cricket’s overlords. Defending himself valiantly, he was exonerated. The second circle of awfulness, though, was just as bad – he became
Gawping at the famous sights of the Cotswolds has been a popular pastime for centuries. So too is writing about the huge numbers of people gawping at the famous sights of the Cotswolds. The Times, Telegraph, Express and the BBC have all covered the explosion of mass-tourism since the pandemic, which is driven mainly by
The day after the Serbia vs England match, while sunbathing on my balcony, I espied an interesting vignette taking place on the lawns beneath my apartment block. A little boy was playing football with a man I took to be his father, who looked like a hipster of the kind you can see by the
Over five decades, I have been lucky enough to witness some of the great rock concerts of our time. Bob Dylan at Blackbushe in the late 1970s, The Everly Brothers Reunion Concert at the Albert Hall in the early 1980s, The Rolling Stones at New York’s Shea Stadium in the 1990s and Bruce Springsteen and
Everyone knows that Italy is a boot. Many people know that the boot has a heel – the rocky, sunburnt region of Puglia. Perhaps a few know that the heel has a spur – the Gargano Peninsula. Yet virtually no one knows that the Gargano hides a magical woodland – the Foresta Umbra – a
It is no longer normal to see Hollywood men looking normal anymore. From the empty cheeks of Ozempic face to the puffed-out Brotox foreheads to the eerily-uniform veneers of Turkey teeth, no one seems to be aging, but no one seems to also be quite so attractive. Even Ryan Gosling, once my favourite heart-throb, has
You really have to force yourself to love flying. Sitting on the tarmac for an hour and a half with an air conditioning unit that won’t turn off and two babies locked in a battle of who can scream the loudest is not in my ‘Top 10 Days Well Spent For Zak’. But the plane