Wolfsegg, Austria I have finally understood what’s wrong with the modern world: motorways. These dehumanising slabs of asphalt covering our continents are Prometheus-like chains that lure us into non-stop movement and uniformity. But before you start screaming that you’ve been isolated for months and would give up a night with Jennifer Lawrence to roar down
Saturday night we ate outside next to the floodlit rock face. Four adult guests came puffing up the path and one child, George, celebrating his 11th birthday. A string of low-wattage coloured bulbs hung above our heads. Chicken curry. Dahl. Pink wine. Yellow champagne. Little brass oil lamps on the table. John Mayall & the
We went on our first outing, to the beach at Littlehampton, but I’m not sure it was as stress-relieving as it could have been. We kept getting into trouble with the two-metre-ites. These are the people who are using the two metre rule as an excuse to be damnably rude. We packed a picnic and
I used to live in Mogadishu for months at a time, cooped up in compounds behind fortified walls. Venturing on to the streets meant a flak jacket, escort vehicle bristling with guns, chain-smoking as we zoomed through smashed districts, militias, ambushes and roadside bombs. Despite the incarceration, Somalia gave me some of my happiest memories.
What did you do during the great lockdown, Daddy? Well, son, I grew a beard, watched all 264 episodes of Frasier and became a raging inebriate. Well, I didn’t so much grow a beard deliberately as do nothing to stop it sprouting. And while I fully intend to see the whole Frasier canon chronologically, I
On Sunday, the hosts of Trigger–nometry, a YouTube show, posted an interview they’d done with Peter Hitchens. They labelled it ‘Lockdown is a catastrophe’, which is an accurate summary of the journalist’s view. Over the next 24 hours, instead of generating tens of thousands of hits, which their interviews normally do, it got very few.
Q. I own a small, somewhat shabby and antiquated but well-located flat in central London which I have been happy to lend out to friends as I wasn’t using it much myself. No one was there during lockdown but four separate people stayed for various lengths of time just before. No one paid to stay
Now that I have considered Monster Munch I decide to eat one mindfully. I put it in my mouth, and it is as if I can taste it for the first time. It is repulsive, and I feel cheated. This is, then, an intervention. My husband wrote in these pages that I am always watching
‘So my poor wife rose by five o’clock in the morning, before day, and went to market and bought fowls and many other things for dinner, with which I was highly pleased,’ wrote Samuel Pepys on 13 January 1667. They were eight. ‘I had for them, after oysters, at first course, a hash of rabbits,
Hours of googling have left me unable to find the essay on domestic horticulture, written by a Victorian aristocrat, which contains the legendary sentence: ‘Any garden, of whatever size, should contain at least three acres of mature woodland.’ And though that seems a high bar to set, in times like this, millions of Brits have
