Life

High life

I love Greece and the Greeks but they have destroyed Athens

Athens This ancient city without tourists reminds me of the Athens I once knew and loved, but for the hideous 1960s modern buildings that have defaced its beauty like plastic surgery gone wrong. Walking around the Old Royal Palace and the National Gardens I point out some old beauties to the wife on Herod Atticus

Low life

How to survive a heatwave

Provence-Alpes-Côte D’Azur A burning ball appears over the brow of the hill at seven o’clock every morning and then you have roughly two hours to perform outdoor stuff such as shopping. After that you are roasted alive even sitting under a parasol with a hat on or swimming in a pool, and you flee indoors,

Real life

You can’t sing in church but you can get a tattoo

From my seat in the greasy spoon café I looked out on a typical English row of shops on a typical English street in a typical English village turned suburb. It was a rundown block consisting of a betting shop, a hairdresser, a charity shop, a chemist, an off-licence, a tattoo parlour and, right at

Wild life

Solidarity in Soho: running a coronavirus testing centre

London Simon, proprietor of the sex shop opposite our Covid-19 testing centre in Soho, insisted on popping a pack of Sildenafil in my top pocket each time I passed his ribbon curtains. ‘Have a lovely weekend,’ he’d say kindly. For several weeks we occupied the delightful Boulevard Theatre at the end of Berwick Street. With

Wine Club

Wine Club 1 August

It was when the old lady passing the bottle bank lobbed me two quid and told me to get myself a nice cup of tea that I realised my lockdown face fungus had to go. I hadn’t shaved for months and as I battled with the empties that spewed noisily from my split carrier bag,

No sacred cows

How to get into a club and on to a plane

Disaster struck the Young family last Friday. My 12-year-old son Charlie woke up with a temperature. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t matter, but we were in the Dolomites and due to fly back to England from Venice later that day. On the flight out, we’d all had our temperature checked with an infrared thermometer pointed at our

Spectator Sport

The magnificence of Carlos Brathwaite

We know about the endlessly jaw-dropping greatness of Ben Stokes (a peerage soon, surely), the furious power of a supercharged Stuart Broad and even Joe Root’s increasingly skilful captaincy. But another highlight of the brilliant Test series against West Indies was the presence of Carlos Brathwaite as a Test Match Special summariser and general benign

Dear Mary

Food

Mind your language

Might ‘may’ kill ‘might’?

‘I’m with the King,’ said my husband. The king in question was Kingsley Amis, whose choleric The King’s English was published posthumously in 1997. The joke in the title depended on knowing two things: that there was an earlier book on English usage of that name (by the brothers H.W. and F.G. Fowler, 1906) and