New York If Albanian television had shown the programme CBS did last week — with a woman who has sex on camera for a living describing how she had unprotected Bing-Bing with the president — I think even Albanians would feel so diminished they’d move to Kosovo. But this is America, and it’s a woman’s,
My boy rang the other night. He said he and his wife had bought tickets to see Ed Sheeran at the O2 arena in London. ‘How much were the tickets?’ I said. They were over £400 the pair, he said, and I was about to say in a strangulated voice, ‘How much?’ Then I remembered
The broken mirror lay in hundreds of shattered pieces on my bathroom floor, having fallen off the wall while I was out. I had hung it with one of those ‘easy fix’ sticky-back hooks that don’t require drilling or screws. You know the ones. They don’t damage your walls or your tiles. And they don’t
Laikipia, Kenya Erupe is a Kenyan farmer. He owns a smallholding of a few acres not far from my own place. When we meet our talk is usually about the vagaries that preoccupy farmers: crops, rain, livestock diseases and market prices. On his little patch he built a dwelling from mud and wattle with a
Something very odd occurred at a funeral I attended last week — somebody died. I don’t mean the person who was being buried. They had died a few days earlier, obviously. I mean one of the mourners passed away during the service. That was shocking in its own right, but what made it surreal is
I haven’t seen so many men crying since the end of A Tale of Two Cities at the Scala Cinema in Oxford in the late 1950s. As the credits rolled, stern-faced blokes whipped out their hankies and dabbed their eyes. But by the time the lights went up, the hankies were replaced and upper lips
Q. Along with five of my favourite people, I’ve been invited again to what should be an idyllic house party in Scotland this summer. The house, the landscape, the food and the sport could not be better, and our mutual friend is a brilliant host capable of great empathy and wit — 99 per cent of
Sometimes I fret that Soho House & Co is doing to this column what it does to London. It places its smooth tentacles in my prose and suddenly the column has a pointy beard and is playing table tennis, while doing something monstrous in advertising. But I have no choice. I cannot hide in ghostly
Jay Bernard won the Ted Hughes Award last week. I managed to hear a snippet of the winning poem on Today and was pleasantly surprised by its poetic quality. My husband was harrumphing a bit because the poet began by saying, ‘Soo… basically,’ and in his opinion went downhill from there, by talking about the poem
