Poor Michael Jackson. His last words were: ‘Take me to the children’s ward.’ But it was nice of the jockeys in Santa Anita to wear a black mourning band in honour of a man who rode more three-year-old winners than anyone. Mind you, I thought the great Paul Johnson was the best when I happened
His shop was empty. There was no waiting. The barber delightedly welcomed me into his chair. Was I Iooking forward to the start of the new football season? Who did I support? Was it them over there? (He pointed with his head to the football stadium just across the road.) He was a Manchester United
Writer’s block On my to-do list: ‘Write letter to sponsored child’. It’s been there for months but I can’t shift it. It’s proving more stubborn than ‘send tax return stuff to accountant’. I had been really looking forward to it in the beginning. I had imagined myself sitting in my study like Jack Nicholson in
Half an hour before it might have been Armageddon. The sky was black as pitch and the rain was bucketing down, not the happiest sound in a yard which two years ago was flooded out. But as an athletic bunch of horses jingled round the copper beech in Harry Dunlop’s trotting circle the atmosphere was
‘Hyper-parenting’ may be bad — but look what happened when I tried the alternative A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a Father’s Day piece that described a typical Sunday in my life. Essentially, it involved being an indentured slave to my four young children. Several people pointed out that I was guilty of ‘helicopter
Q. An old friend summoned me to a black-tie dinner at the Cambridge college of which he is master. On arrival I found I had forgotten cuff links so I threaded a shoelace through each cuff and tied them together that way. Knowing that I have about 20 pairs of cuff links at home, I
Someone at dinner the other day tried to convince us that the origin of the phrase sent to Coventry had something to do with a London livery company expelling members for some misdemeanour, forcing them to practise in Coventry, beyond the territorial limit of livery authority or (according to another version) a free-trade town that
I was all set to write a scathing piece about Lord Carter’s newly published Digital Britain report (http://tinyurl.com/ksp9t7) when, in a break with journalistic practice, I decided to read it first. In fact many of its proposals make sense. For instance I now accept the case for the controversial 50p-a-month tax on phone lines in
