Just as you always hope will happen, I knew I had met the man of my dreams almost on sight. I had made a booking the day before. I arrived. Burak was just finishing the previous customer and gestured with a comb towards an armchair. A Turkish coffee was brought. The customer paid and left
A warm Sahara wind was blowing and by late afternoon the western sky where it met the sea was the colour of golden sand. Surfers bobbed like seals on the milky ocean, waiting for a wave. It stretched like a sheet of silk all the way to the golden horizon. Lying by the hotel pool
So there I was at some swanky party, so swanky that I knew absolutely nobody. I think I was invited by mistake. I mooched about, got bored and muscled in on a group of fun-looking folk – and soon found myself chatting to one Diogo Veiga, export manager for Brimoncourt Champagne. Never heard of it, I
Bishop did not wish to be associated with ‘someone who appears to be modelling himself on a Bond villain’ In a notorious interview in the Sunday Times in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist James Watson said, among other things, that aborting babies with gay genes was ‘common sense’ and that ‘all our social policies are
Q. I have a dear friend who is in a newish relationship. The partner – whom I hardly know – recently visited my city, asked to stay, and groped me soon after arriving. I would like to maintain my relationship with my friend, but if I invite him for dinner he’ll ask to bring his
Crime. Fear not: none of us was planning to break the law, with the possible exception of hate speech. Where that is concerned, how would one start? But we were more concerned with crime and literature, and a fascinating perennial question. What is the distinction between crime fiction and novels? In the 1990s, I introduced
‘Har-!’ exclaimed my husband, ‘Har-! Har-!’ It is not easy to exclaim the syllable har– without sounding like a walrus, and I can’t say that he succeeded. But he was not wrong. I had read out to him a letter from a reader in Hertfordshire and I had pronounced the t in the county. One
Dull day. The Black Mountains in mist. The houses crawl up the lower slopes like rising damp. I wander the town devoid of purpose. November’s fallen leaves siliconed to the wet Monmouth Road. At five the streets eerily vacated as if there’s a curfew. Everything already now so last year. Weatherspoon’s beerhall empty but for
You did London early, at nineteen: the basement room, the geriatric nursing, cinema queues, modish fall-apart dresses, and marriage at Stoke Newington Registry Office, Spring 1955, on the rebound. Marrying was what we did in those days. And soon enough you were back in Wellington with your eye-shadow and your Edith Piaf records buying kitchen
We struggle to remember what we came up for – spaghetti or air – who our neighbour said was coming to fix what, the conifer we’ve just planted. We watch too much Netflix, play word games online when we should be asleep. We cast off covers, cast them on again, force ourselves to rest upright
I had a friend whose approach to entrepreneurialism was to take two separate things that seemed stupidly popular and somehow find a way to combine them. He thought karaoke was ridiculous; his friend thought 24-hour rolling news channels were daft. The two of them created a 24-hour karaoke channel in Asia – and sold it
