Life

High life

How not to run a literary festival

Gstaad A friend of mine who lives here wants to start a literary festival and asked me if I had any advice for him. He’s a nice fellow and very friendly with my daughter, but he’s also the type who, had he been on board the Titanic, would have thought that the engines had stopped

Low life

Real life

Wild life

Wine Club

Wine Club 4 July

It is with a real sense of achievement that I report our council was obliged to send the recycling lorry down our street twice last week rather than the usual once. And don’t think for a moment it was there to pick up extra piles of paper or plastic. Nope, the lorry came simply to

No sacred cows

We’re facing a tsunami of censorship

It’s open season on mavericks and dissenters at the moment. If you publicly challenge any of the sacred nostrums of the social justice left and you work in a school, a college, a university, an arts company, a public broadcasting organisation, a tech company, a charity, a local authority or, indeed, Whitehall, you are at

Spectator Sport

Dear Mary

Food

Can a chef teach me to cook over Zoom?

We cannot bear more drive-through or take-out or near-fatal snack. I am convinced of the boredom of my female ancestors, which is another truth pandemic threw out, and eventually all gags run out to dust. I am happy to leave my review of Penzance McDonald’s where it belongs, which is unwritten. Food is love after

Mind your language

Does ‘swathe’ rhyme with ‘bathe’ or ‘moth’?

At Glastonbury in 2017 ‘a whole swathe of young people had a political awakening’, chanting ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’, said the Guardian last week. Swathes tend to be whole. Either that or vast, huge, great. Soldiers on first world war battlefields were mown down in them. If a swathe retains a literal meaning, on which its