Provence A few days before my middle daughter’s Oxfordshire wedding this summer, my youngest announced that she and her fiancé, who’ve been together for years, were getting married within weeks. They’re moving abroad and bringing their wedding forward would help, she said. Two daughters married in less than a month. Mrs Bennet would be proud
My passport and driving licence sat on the counter but the girl stared back at me, repeating her demand. ‘I need your DVLA check code,’ she said. I told her I didn’t have the slightest idea what she was on about. ‘I need your DVLA check code,’ she said again, doing her best ‘computer says
When it comes to traditional recipes, there are few things we love more than an unlikely origin story, ideally one born out of clumsiness or forgetfulness. The bigger the kitchen pratfall, the more delicious the product. Setting pancakes on fire? Accidental crêpe Suzette! Nothing in the restaurant apart from lettuce and some pantry ingredients? The
Bordeaux is much on our mind at Spectator Towers. Not only are we still sobering up from our riotous annual Clays, Claret and Cognac Cruise down the Thames but we’re also preparing our first determined assault on Bordeaux itself, with 20 readers joining me there for five wine-soaked days this month. And, to top it
I thought the Spectator dinner for Michael Gove hosted by Fraser Nelson would be cancelled. To be clear, this wasn’t a dinner where the Ming vase would be passed from one custodian to another, witnessed by the magazine’s general staff. Rather, this was a dinner to celebrate Michael’s legacy as education secretary organised weeks earlier
There may still be some poor benighted souls who regard the Springboks as the bane of rugby union. If you meet one, get ready to dispense a proper mauling. South Africa, for so long the Millwall of rugby, are playing an all-round game that is so breathtakingly attractive you have to love them. It may
Q. I am at a dinner and the man on my right won’t turn and I am staring ahead feeling ultra self-conscious and victimy. The table is too wide for the people opposite to help out. What to do? – L.P., London W11 A. Twenty years ago the answer to this question would have been: ‘Place
At Julie’s at the fag end of Saturday lunchtime, Notting Hill beauties are defiantly not eating, and the table is covered with crumbs. Restaurant Ozymandias, I think to myself. This is no longer a district for the perennially wracked, or unrich. The Black Cross – Martin Amis’s ideal pub in London Fields – is now
‘Did she mean youth clubs?’ asked my husband when I said how annoying I found the promise made by Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, to provide ‘new youth hubs to steer young people away from violence’. No, she definitely said ‘hubs’. Everyone has to have a hub now. Sophy Ridge has one on television at
The decision, now my mother’s off her feet, off her food but not, thank god, her rocker, is for a rota of nephews and nieces to drop in and keep an eye on her so she’s not alone. Unshod gypsy horses cropping the grass of a traffic island in autumn’s last-blown leaves (from
There’s no shrewder punter than J.P. McManus who likes to say: ‘There’d be many more fish in the sea if they could only learn to keep their mouths shut.’ Last year, clever young Emmet Mullins won the Cesarewitch with J.P.’s The Shunter but when Emmet let it be known that he was aiming for the
