I don’t know who was the dumber of the two: the Greek banker apparently rushing to spend 100 million big ones on a London pad, or the American woman who fell off a cliff in Alaska while busy texting? Both dummies survived, which goes to show that the Almighty must have a weakness for the
I peered through the slatted blind to see what the weather was doing. A Mediterranean-blue sky was parked over the rooftops of Camden. Few people were out and about in the street early. I was the cab driver’s first fare of the day. He didn’t look elated to see me. When I told him where
Success. Finally, I have made someone in a call centre do what I want, when I want and how I want it. I stumbled on the secret formula for getting jobsworths to co-operate quite by accident. It was an ordinary day. I was sitting in my kitchen waiting for British Gas to arrive to change
For the fifth year running my nearest village in Northamptonshire has just hosted a weekend of celebration called ‘Stoke Bruerne: Village at War’. A busy two-day programme of events, including a Spitfire fly-past, a bread-and-dripping and spam-sandwich tuck-in, and classes in how to dance the Lambeth Walk, started on Saturday morning with a formal opening
In my last Spectator column, I mounted a polemical defence of Michael Gove’s GCSEs reforms and, in the course of advancing my argument, I made a claim that I’ve subsequently been hounded about. Indeed, a website called fullfact.org mounted an investigation into this claim and concluded that I was guilty of ‘gross exaggeration’. Needless to
That seems to be that then, the final episode of the best sporting year since, well, 1977 at least. That was another jubilee year, but Ginny taking tea with the Queen, Red Rum at the National, Liverpool winning the European Cup and England the Ashes is still no match for 2012. This is a year
Q. My son is 22. He has left Cambridge with a good degree, but also a mullet hairstyle (short and sticking out at the front and sides but long at the back). These are the key years when he could be getting a job and a girlfriend and, without the mullet, he would be exceptionally
Burger & Lobster is a -restaurant for capitalism in crisis, an existential moan for something simpler and less awful. Either that, or it is restaurant for small boys with jobs, who cannot make up their minds what they want and miss that -restaurant where you could get custard and a beating from a woman who looked like
My husband had for some reason got stuck into a television politics discussion of whether Boris Johnson should be serious or joky at the Conservative party conference. The latter demeanour may have served him as Mayor of London, the argument went, but the former would be needed to become Prime Minister. The dilemma matches the
