Spectator Life

There’s something unsettling about a statue with its head lobbed off. Sure, it’s just a piece of stone. But it represents something. There are headless statues in churches all over France, statues of bishops, martyrs, saints. It’s not surprising those statues came out of the French revolution badly; the church and its clerics weren’t popular.

It is still the case on transatlantic flights that a drinks trolley comes to even the farthest reaches of Economy. If you’re lucky, the gay man or imposing Essex girl wheeling it will, with a wink and a smile, palmed you over an extra mini bottle of gin or a wine for the meal. They

‘Sit up straight, heels down, lean forward, lean back, tighten the reins, loosen the reins.’ Joe’s instructions replay in my head as I scan the canyon floor for rattlesnakes. I gently push my heels into the sides of my horse, Rio, and he sets off across the rocky terrain. Joe is my guide and a

‘August for the people and their favourite islands,’ wrote W.H. Auden. My own favourite island in Britain is the Isle of Wight, even though my introduction to it was less than ideal. I was seven years old and had been sent to the island for the ritual initiation for British middle-class males of my generation:

A recent, rather beautiful piece published here told of how the writer, Druin Burch, initially somewhat alarmed by the variety of naked bodies he unexpectedly encounters while swimming in the Med (‘I wouldn’t mind if it was only young women,’ he says to his wife) comes to appreciate the loveable imperfection of the human form.

If I were a doctor specialising in alternative treatments, and someone came to me feeling depressed, I wouldn’t send them off with a herb-based elixir or a bunch of St John’s Wort. I wouldn’t cleanse their chakras or refer them to an acupuncturist. I’d send them off to Málaga’s annual fair, which this year runs

There’s something about motorway service stations that seems to encourage the very worst in human behaviour. They’re places where no doubt usually responsible members of society have long decided that it’s permissible to drop semi-industrial amounts of litter on to the verges, urinate all over the toilet floor and belch with impunity while queuing up

Every time I’m in Switzerland, where I grew up, I find myself madly squeezing as much rubbish as I can into a garbage bag. It’s a delicate and messy task. In Switzerland, every bag of non-recyclable waste comes with a price tag – and it’s expensive. You won’t be surprised that the Swiss have perfected

These days, most English seaside towns are sites of national mourning. You pay your respects by walking up some deathtrap pier, dropping two pence in an arcade coin pusher and whispering, your flower now on the grave: ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ But Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, has managed to stave off

In the western imagination, Yemen exists as a byword for terrorism and death. Its appearances in international headlines are flattened into a trilogy of suffering: Houthis, hunger, hopelessness. The civil war has dragged on for over a decade, leaving much of the nation in ruins. Life is punishing for the millions who navigate daily existence

When is a journey not a journey? The answer to this pseudo-Zen riddle, at least according to Sadiq Khan’s Transport for London, is: when the journey is one that the passenger intends to make but is unable to complete. Have I lost you? Allow me to explain. Recently I experienced yet again one of the regular

A.E. Housman once wrote that the English villages of Clunton and Clunbury, Clungunford and Clun ‘are the quietest places under the sun’. He’s almost right. I grew up in Clunton and the only place I’ve felt a deeper sense of quiet is Escaladei, a village high up in the mountainous Priorat region of Spain, which

Having just turned 65, I enjoyed a week of firsts. My first ever facial and my first ever yoga class progressed to my first ever impedancemetry session, my first ever photobiomodulation session, my first ever hyberbaric chamber session, my first ever cryotherapy session, my first ever sensory deprivation session, my first ever neurofeedback session and

It was when I saw two other women wearing the same red-and-white-striped Boden swimming costume as me that I realised what I had become. Twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have been seen dead on a beach in Salcombe in a Boden swimming costume. I would have been topless on a riverbank in Provence, smoking a

Homer is much praised, but I find him unreliable. The Mediterranean cove in which we were swimming, for example, was not in the least wine-dark. We were turning around and swimming back, the sights on display at the nudist end of the beach having startled the spluttering elegance of my head-above-water breast-stroke. ‘I wouldn’t mind

Modern irritations seem to come in threes. No sooner do you trip over a Lime bike ‘parked’ on its side in the middle of the pavement than you discover that the self-checkout in the Co-op has a handwritten note stating ‘out of order’ taped to it and the man in front of you in the

As a kid growing up in the Bronx and afterwards in the suburbs to the north, I loved New York. To me it was like the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz – vast, glittering and full of promise. It was where my family settled after escaping the nightmare of communist dictatorship, in the

Tashkent, Uzbekistan I am in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. I am standing in a historic complex of madrasas and mosques, courtyards and dusty roses, and I am staring at the ‘oldest Quran in the world’. It is a strange and enormous thing: written in bold Kufic script on deerskin parchment; it was supposedly compiled

Jeff Bezos has brought much tat into the world, along with the undoubted convenience of Amazon’s services. But in at least one respect, he is a man of good taste. In choosing Venice to plight his troth with his lovely bride Lauren Sanchez at the weekend, Bezos picked the best possible location: La Serenissima is

The Lake District isn’t really meant to be about eating. It’s about walking and climbing and gawping. The guide one carries is not that by Michelin but Alfred Wainwright, whose seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells turns 70 this year. Food is mainly to be consumed from a Thermos rather than a bowl, and

I am in the most EU-ish bedroom in the EU. That is to say, I am lying in a refurbished room in the handsome 14th-century Chateau de Schengen, in the little village of Schengen, Luxembourg. From my casements, opened wide onto the sunny Saarland afternoon, I can see the exact stretch of the river Moselle

I confess that I suffer from CBS: Clarkson Bipolar Syndrome. I really like Jeremy: I bought my Land Rover Discovery 3 after he drove one up a mountain in Scotland, and I would happily have a pint with him at his new pub. He knows a lot about cars – but not so much about

As someone who flies a lot for work, many of my moments of high blood pressure or ‘Is this really what I want in life?’ introspection take place in airports or on aeroplanes. I cannot – to put it gently – relate to the moronic practitioners of the ‘airport theory’, which involves turning up deliberately