Chelsea/Gstaad Oh, to be in England! But let’s start at the beginning. I challenge any reader to claim they are more technologically disadvantaged than yours truly. Or anyone not suffering from Alzheimer’s, at least. I resisted getting a mobile telephone until my days on board a sailing boat became a nightmare. I missed get-togethers, lost
‘Alas, David can’t be here this afternoon,’ I told the French teacher as she let me into her light and spacious home. ‘He has an appointment to see a specialist about his ears.’ I tried to say this in French. Conversational exchanges that take place between her front door and the lesson table are usually
Watching a woman driving a dog past my house like a carthorse is just another ‘new normal’ of lockdown. This moron had two long ropes attached to a harness around the body of her huge dog and was trying to steer it along the village green by long-reining it from behind as though it were
Along with many other people, I gave up drinking for the month of January and then resumed with gusto on 1 February. But my 13-year-old son Fred, the only Christian in my household, urged me to give it up again for Lent. ‘Why not keep me company?’ he asked, having decided to forego sugar. But
After the thrills and spills and last-gasp excitements of England’s triple-headed series in India, the attention of the cricket fan moves on. But to where? To Derbyshire’s next game, say — a university match at the county ground, over what promises to be a somewhat nippy Easter weekend. Or perhaps to the Indian Premier League,
Q. I have been working (from home) for a TV comedy production company for a year. My job is scouting for scripts. In my spare time I have been co-writing a comedy script with a friend. Had I not been its co-author, I would have judged it perfect for the company I work for —
This week my son came home from school and asked me if it was true that the Jews killed Jesus. Um, I said. Read the Gospels. Read Hyam Maccoby. Ask your father. My husband is a religious maniac, though Christian. Any patriarchy will do. He insists I pretend to be an ultra-Orthodox Jew for festivals,
‘What, old monkey-face!’ said my husband with unnecessary lack of gallantry. He was referring to the 18th Duchess of Alba, who held 40 titles of nobility and died in 2014. She was a bit out of his league, but it is true that her bone structure came to give her face a simian air. As
A 3×5 snap, black-and-white, fading, fallsfrom the pages. Summer ’68, Cuckmere Havensnatched with a child’s Instamatic: blurry, askew –tilted skyward mid-skirmish from a grassed-overtrench carved into the Downs. Resurrected:grinning urchins gangly in shorts – Bell, Lomax, Leeper – hamming it up as prisoner and Jerries,a penknife’s glint at the throat of a boy whose namenow
How Father Sean Breen would have loved this year’s Cheltenham Festival. The late parish priest at Ballymore Eustace, who owned a horse or two and had a pundit’s tipping spot on Kildare FM, used to complain that it was most inconsiderate of people to die in the Cheltenham run-up: over 40 years, it was only
