Nostalgia barged in like gangbusters. What brought it on was a brief article about the most charming and enchanting of young women, Nancy Olson. Seventy-two years ago, she was in that rare gem of a movie, Sunset Boulevard, playing the rosy-cheeked screenwriter who was the love interest of William Holden, the writer who was handsome
My favourite vet came to see Darcy and immediately put his finger on the problem. Dusk was falling when he climbed out of his battered 4×4 in khaki shorts and crumpled T-shirt, sun-burned, muddy and sweaty from the day’s call-outs. He is a victim of his own brilliance, and the decades of experience that have
It’s possible that, like me, your first encounter with the Grande Dame of the Austrian pastry world, the apfelstrudel, was not in fact in one of the famed Viennese grand cafés, but rather from the freezer aisle at the supermarket. If it was anything like mine, it was probably a latticed, puffed version; the one
Here’s a paradox. Over the past two-and-a-half years, a cadre of senior politicians and their ‘expert’ advisers across the world have successfully promoted a series of controversial public policies by claiming they’re based on ‘the science’ rather than a particular moral or ideological vision. I’m thinking of lockdowns and net zero in particular. Yet at
Q. I have had an email inviting me to an old girls’ reunion, class of 1976. The organiser suggested we ‘reply all’ so that everyone could see who else was able to attend. Now I have had no fewer than four super-excited emails from other old girls saying they can’t wait till the reunion, so
August may not be the cruellest month but it is often the most dangerous one. Now that it is over, and rosé is giving way to grouse, we can console ourselves. There has not been a world war. We merely face a number of middle–ranking crises. Over fortifying bottles, I was chatting about such matters
It is easy to laugh at young people asking for sympathy because ‘I’ve got mental health’. I think I heard the journalist-turned-teacher Lucy Kellaway on the wireless recently noticing in a half-baffled way the tendency of pupils to call mental illness mental health. Mental health hasn’t quite achieved that meaning in standard speech, but it
Neutral as a wheel it is not culpable for what it picks up. Shock jocks, phone-in bigots, ministerial lies and bleating celebs. A cup cannot be blamed for what fills it. No judgment. No fear of offence just submission to whatever is snatched out of the air by chameleon range be it war,
They’ve taken down the trees round Keeper’s Pool. The water’s lifeless, bright and calm, the only creatures left are two white swans, their nest a circled heap of twigs and litter a few yards from a park bench looking at the view – the golf-course, flagged and sweatered. Forever symbols in some poem; what
You told me that you’d read, And were struck by That night in bed, A sermon on the naked limbs that lie Inside your soul, And as you told me so, Our youngest son, whose loud voice cried, rushed Usurpingly to climb Inside our sheets and quilt, with soaked
Her grief is like the shadow play of bones snapped in an old X-ray unsleeved to show what love had done to her and her bright skeleton. Lit up, half-cut, she starts to flag still clutching her green shopping bag of gin and ashes as she weaves through deep, midge-haunted silences exhausted to this break
‘To arrive at the place you know not, you must go by the way you know not.’ – St. John of the Cross How many times the bloody GPS led us astray. It pointed us down stairs, over a cliff, into a pathless field barbed-wire barred and pocked with curious cows. Castel Gandolfo,
Some years ago, an Australian neurologist was in the habit of walking barefoot across his lawn. This being Australia, the lawn was slightly prickly, and the experience was painful but not intolerable; until one day, when one of the pricks in his heel was more pronounced than usual. He had been bitten by a snake
Irish trainer John F. O’Neill owes the stalls handlers at Goodwood a good drink or two. In Ireland this season he has run just three horses – Tullyhogue Fort, Daily Pursuit and Pink Fire Lilly – in a total of 13 races at an average starting price of around 100-1. None has won. Last Saturday,
