My last week in London and it is just as well. One more would most likely kill me. The least frantic event was the one that Simon Phillips and Roger Moore threw in Harry’s Bar for Unicef, as worthy a charity as there is, following the Masterpiece Fair at the former Chelsea Barracks. I sat
On Saturday I went to a wedding and didn’t touch a drop of alcohol and it was fine. I enjoyed myself more, I think, than if I’d been slinging them back. On Sunday evening, pleased with myself about this, and seriously considering permanent sobriety, I went to the pub. The England v. Germany match had
On the basis that nothing is simple any more, I knew that renewing my passport was going to be a feat of mental and emotional endurance. However, I had not expected it to turn into an image consultation with the world’s most insulting women. One of them, I hasten to point out, was a machine.
South Africa Rarely is Jonathan Clayton, the Times man in Africa, far from the front lines — but this month when I stayed at his Johannesburg house the battlefield came home. My visits tend to cause distress to Christiane, Jonty’s German wife. Christiane hasn’t trusted me since I got her husband drunk at a Christmas
Last week the BBC website ran a story about some new research casting doubt on the effectiveness of free schools. ‘The Swedish model of free schools, lauded by the Conservatives, has not significantly improved pupils’ academic achievement, a study suggests,’ it began. So what was this study? It purports to be a paper written by
Q. At a recent funeral wake I was horrified to see a man who did much to make my life a misery during my schooldays. I have no wish to see this man again or to have anything to do with him. My attempt at avoiding him at the wake was unsuccessful. Instead he made
A reader has written to complain that a contributor to The Spectator used the construction ‘I was sat’. A reader has written to complain that a contributor to The Spectator used the construction ‘I was sat’. Veronica has also shown me an article in the Daily Mail about sex tourists in Thailand, which says: ‘Sat
In the end I ignored my own advice and bought an Apple iPad, purely, as I explained to my wife, ‘for the purposes of research’. The very same ‘research’ that has by now filled two or three desk drawers with a ridiculous assortment of electrical chargers, the devices they once charged mostly lost, burnt out
