Life

Still Life

Martin has worn down my defences

Provence My older, adopted sister came to stay. She suffers from peripheral neuropathy secondary to diabetes and is registered disabled. It’s a worry watching her negotiate the cliff path and the 12 stone steps to the front door with her stick, but she adores it here. Since reversing her insulin-dependent diabetes with an extreme fasting

Real life

Hands off my empty plastic bottles!

‘Where are my empty plastic bottles?’ I ran around the house screaming, after discovering my stash had disappeared. The government in Ireland has done something with the recycling laws that has made people into wild-eyed scavengers. It has introduced a scheme whereby you can feed all your empty bottles and cans into a machine in

More from life

Wine Club

Wine Club: bargains to see you through the darkening days 

Phew, we made it! I counted them all out and I counted them all back and our full complement of intrepid readers was present and correct as we gathered for our journey home, albeit quieter and more liverish than at embarkation. Our inaugural Spectator Wine Club assault on Bordeaux had been a glorious, heart-swelling success.

No sacred cows

Will Keir Starmer get me banned from football games?

Last Saturday, I made the 400-mile round trip to Burnley with my 16-year-old son Charlie to see Queens Park Rangers play the Clarets. Quite a long way to go, given that Burnley was one of three teams relegated from the Premier League last season and are expected to go straight back up, while QPR are

Spectator Sport

The glaring mismatch in English football

Your starter for ten: who was the last English manager to win the top flight of English football? Treat yourself to a half-time pie and a mug of Bovril if you said Howard Wilkinson, who took the First Division championship with Leeds United in 1992, the final season before the formation of the Premier League.

Dear Mary

Food

You’re spoiling us: The Ambassadors Clubhouse reviewed

The Ambassadors Clubhouse is on Heddon Street, close to Savile Row and the fictional HQ of Kingsman, which was a kind of privatised MI6. I wonder if the Kingsmen eat here, being clubmen. Heddon Street needs fiction because its reality is one-dimensional. It is an alleyway behind Regent Street, and it used to be interesting.

Mind your language

Does ‘tummy’ turn your stomach?

‘How old does he think you are?’ asked my husband when I told him my GP had asked me if there was any pain in my tummy. Such infantilising language has already made poo the normal way of talking about excrement. Now it’s tummy. Last week the manager of Arsenal admitted that choosing a team

Poems

Jonas Hanway

No Englishman would be seen dead under one, preferring to run for cover, soaked to the skin, peruke bedraggled, than carry this effeminate device, the ‘Frenchies’ unfurled without a blush. Only Mr Jonas Hanway, by no means wet, having seen off Persian pirates on his travels and an outspoken critic of tea drinking and employment

Namesake

It might be a long, long time since I was christened Christopher And nicknamed Kit… but not so long ago As 1570, when was born my namesake, Who did his best to stage the Fireworks Show That nearly happened. Yet they blew their chance    And came to grief, as which of us wouldn’t have

The Wisdom Tooth

I probed its crown with the tip of my tongue and it creaked like a bough a boy swings on. Then with the pincer of finger and thumb I plucked it from its loose bed like a bud and set it on this oak table now a desk. It was taller than I thought and

The turf

My fears for the National Hunt Chase

World politics is dire but so long as Mick Herron is writing spy novels, David Mitchell is raising laughs and Bukayo Saka is scoring goals there is joy available and I have lived to see the start of another proper jumps season at the Cheltenham Showcase meeting. Saturday’s racing did, however, provide a sharp reminder