An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
The royals, like most families, had a very different Christmas last year due to Covid restrictions. Traditionally, multiple generations of the family gather at Sandringham House for the festivities. This year the Queen is expected to return to her Norfolk residence once again, to host her extended family for what will be a poignant Christmas
Like a lot of things it began with the cleaners. You may be old enough to remember when there were actual cleaners in offices before they all vanished about 20 years ago. In fact they didn’t disappear, they just got outsourced. That usually meant that nothing much got cleaned especially anymore, but bins were changed
In the latest James Bond movie, which passes for the National soul – though I think Roald Dahl was closer to nailing it – a Toyota Land Cruiser Prado wins a fight with a Land Rover Defender in Norway. Or rather two Land Rover Defenders. Out they bounce from forest to stream and back to
It feels good to say that you own a Peloton bike. After months of peering into those enigmatic Apple-style Peloton stores which came into being unsurprisingly in the more affluent areas of London (Knightsbridge, Marylebone and Oxford Street), my wife and I decided to bite the bullet and buy into the Peloton dream. Like many lockdown
Britain’s legendary red phone boxes are in the news again. Of course they’re a symbol of the country’s past (about 2000 of them are officially listed buildings) – but what makes them really great is their capacity for reinvention. The story this week was about Ofcom preventing BT from closing down many of the nation’s
The British have a long-standing reputation for coming up with great ideas, executing them quite well – and then leaving others to really run with them. Such is the history behind what is officially the best-selling two-seat convertible sports car of all time, the evergreen MX-5 made by Japanese marque Mazda. The story goes that the
I live in Mayfair these days. I wander through expensive streets, past costly boutiques, exclusive restaurants, and grand houses where chandeliers glitter behind the windows. I walk past private members’ clubs, through elegant squares and along hidden mews. There are embassies, temples, schools and churches; casinos, cinemas, bookshops, tiny cafes and pubs thronging with white-collar
Inspiration comes in unusual forms. David Lorenz’s lightbulb moment arrived when his classic Mercedes broke down. His small daughter was in the car, and Lorenz began thinking about ways to make it cleaner, more reliable and give it a long term usable future in a world that is turning its back on the internal combustion engine.
It is a grand British tradition, that when trying to raise money for charity, we make ourselves look silly. Nowhere was this more true than with Movember. When Movember first came along, you’d see someone on the streets wearing a moustache and the gut reaction was very much along the lines of, ‘Poor lad, he’s
One of my favourite off-duty pictures of HM the Queen is this photo taken at the Royal Windsor Horse Show in 1979. I love the look of HM’s long pink tweed cape worn with a matching silk headscarf and leather boots. A simple, understated country casual outfit but she still has an air of superwoman
It’s not so long ago that old watches used to turn-up at car boot fairs, charity shops and jumble sales (remember those?), usually in the form of unremarkable models set aside to be ‘got rid of’ after the grim reaper had called time on their original owners. Back then ‘watch collecting’ had yet to benefit
When the famously gloomy British winter starts to tighten its icy grip and spirits begin to wane, a tangible reminder that the sun will shine again always provides a fillip. And I find watching David Niven in the 1958 film Bonjour Tristesse usually does the trick. The movie version of Francoise Sagan’s famous novel about a
It would be interesting to see what people would have turned up in had the Bond premiere not been of the Royal variety with a black-tie dress code. Perhaps Daniel Craig in Yeezys or Lea Seydoux all Parisian chic in a pair of jeans and sweatshirt, we can but wonder. It is a relief that
Once upon a time, the Royal Horticultural Society staged a Great Autumn Show every September in their two Horticultural Halls off Vincent Square in London. It was a fine mixture of colourful nursery trade exhibitions and fiercely-fought amateur competitions, involving fruits, flowers and glowing foliage (Who could forget the amusing annual battle between the Dukes of
After Cabinet members recently took to the microphone for a karaoke evening, is Westminster’s new favourite hobby on course for a winter comeback? With summer days of al fresco cocktails and late-night picnics in the park almost behind us, a let-your-hair-down evening belting out karaoke could be just the answer. Here’s our guide to London’s best booths. Bloomsbury Bowling
It’s a kind of alchemy, transforming worthless clutter into pleasing and valuable collectors’ items, a slow but gratifying process all but forgotten in the modern age. I first learned it from the woman who ran a second-hand record store in my hometown, Tunbridge Wells, from the late seventies to the early nineties, where I misspent
During my first job at an advertising firm, there was a palpable disdain for suits amongst my colleagues. For a newly appointed copywriter, fresh out of university and hooked on Mad Men, wearing a suit seemed like the sensible thing to do in the office. But to the Generation-X creative director I was now working for –
Britain’s staycation charge has seen thousands of people buying campervans for the first time, not least the classic VWs beloved of hippies, surfers and generations of families whose definition of a good day out is a Thermos flask of tea. These clattery, engine-in-the-back vehicles already had cult status, but it seems the pandemic has supercharged their
I once read that after watching a James Bond film men speed in their Honda Civics: they might do 35 mph in a built-up area. If this is so, it is due to the Aston Martin Bond has driven since 1964 (the DB5 in Goldfinger, a man with ‘a cold finger’). The DB5 has appeared in
Searches for paddleboarding locations across the country have risen hugely over the last 18 months, with the global market for paddle boards now estimated to be worth around £7 billion. Stand Up Paddleboarding, also known as SUP, is a popular way to easily and cheaply get out on to the water, without having to purchase a
There are few sports cars as quintessentially English as Morgans. They speak of World War Two and flat-capped Spitfire pilots driving home to their sweethearts through leafy country lanes, taking the bends at maximum speed but courteously slowing down for horses and to wave at the vicar. But now the 113-year-old firm, which has operated
‘I got it in the days when movies moved slower,’ says Hollywood A-lister Tom Hanks of the Airstream caravan that served as a home-from-home while shooting some of his biggest hits of the past 30 years, including Forrest Gump, Apollo 13 and Sleepless in Seattle. But now Hanks is offering the polished aluminium 33-footer at a
In Mary McCarthy’s 1954 novel The Group, Mr Andrews describes the contents of a charity shop (or thrift store if you hail from the States) as an ‘instructive inventory of the passé’. And indeed, all charity shops are repositories of the recent past – a perfect distillation of expended trends and fashions. Worthy of an
There have been various style know-it-alls who have been ruminating over the possible, perhaps inevitable, return of suits which have Miami Vice proportions. The Eighties cop show was bold in its broad silhouette, generous pleats, puffy shoulders and unstructured loucheness that undid 100 years of tailoring’s mission to flatter and ennoble. In 2021 it feels
Have you ever wanted to fly? For me the urge comes whenever I see a bird hovering directly over a hedge, flying into the wind so it can maintain a position and spot prey. It’s not the prey I’m interested in, just the sensation. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to defeat gravity? Like many of us,
Wandering through the sheep pens at the Great Yorkshire Show, it’s clear that a sheep is not ‘just’ a sheep. The sheer array of livestock on display is a lesson in itself. Sheep with fluffy legs; sheep with four enormous horns. Pink sheep, white sheep, brown, black and piebald sheep. Dreadlocked sheep; sheep with huge
In 1983 Cambridge academic W.G. Runciman, reviewing Peter York and Ann Barr’s The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, described the work as an ‘anthropological survey’ in the mould of such distinguished scholars as Malinowski and Veblen. Veblen’s late-nineteenth century The Theory of the Leisure Class was, Runciman explains, an ‘earnest social-Darwinian exercise in the analysis and
Are we witnessing the slow death of manly gardening? A new government initiative urges us that for the sake of bees and pollinators we should leave the mower in the shed and let our lawns turn into savannahs. Some thirty councils are signed up. King’s College Cambridge has turned its lawn into a wild flower
With the emphasis on staying on home turf this summer rather than enduring the risks and administrative tribulations of holidaying ‘overseas’, many of us are heading out in search of parts of the country that we previously never bothered trying to discover. And what better way to find pastures new than by motorcycle? That’s the