On a beautiful, crisp Saturday morning on the first of the month I flew from Gstaad to the château de Dampierre, the duc de Luynes’s seat southwest of Paris. My old friend Jean-Claude Sauer was getting hitched for the fifth time, to a wonderful girl by the name of Brigitte — incidentally, the fifth Brigitte
‘So. Jeremy. Why do you want to learn about eating seaweed?’ said Ingrid as we trooped down the leafy farm track to the beach. Ingrid, our leader for the day, was a spry woman in her early fifties wearing a hand-stitched buckskin Hiawatha tunic and possibly little else. She was going to show us how
Beijing I am in Beijing making a film about the Olympic city with an ex-Lancashire police constable named Andrew. We spend our days aimlessly zooming around vast building sites. Most of the skyscrapers are covered with what resembles sanitary tiling. I feel we are trapped in a giant bathroom, with all the humans being flushed
During this summer of catastrophic floods, a good news story washed up on one or two newspaper sports desks. Ben Kay and Martin Corry, two of England’s most experienced forwards who had been preparing for the Rugby World Cup at the appropriately named city of Bath, drove home through Gloucestershire when they encountered drivers in
The morning after England’s Rugby World Cup triumph over Australia four years ago I walked down my local high street and saw two boys doing something which deeply disturbed me. Knock knock. Who’s there? Jonny. Jonny who? The morning after England’s Rugby World Cup triumph over Australia four years ago I walked down my local
Rugby players come in all shapes and sizes, even if the small ones are now big, strapping and muscle-bound, but when it comes to characters most are only two-dimensional at best. Jonny Wilkinson is the nearest thing the game has to a Beckham-style icon. He is wonderfully talented, admirably dedicated, but also somewhat dull. It
Twenty teams turn up for rugby union’s World Cup but, realistically, less than half a dozen can ever possibly win it — the heavyweight trio from the southern seas, New Zealand, South Africa or Australia and, from the north, 2007’s hosts France and, in any given year, one of the four from the British Isles.
The knives are glinting. The tabloids’ art desks stand ready to superimpose the turnip’s head. Should England’s footballers fail to win the two home matches, against Israel on Saturday and Russia on Wednesday, they are surely doomed to elimination from next summer’s European Championship finals, and their hapless manager Steve McClaren to redundancy and character
Q. I am shortly going to stay in a glamorous venue in Tuscany whose name I cannot reveal here as it would look like vulgar boasting. I have not been there before, and am extremely worried about the layout of the lavatories. Due to having had an extremely strict English nanny who would not let
Q. My son is a member of a rugby team at his university. They are a lovely bunch of chaps during daylight hours but some sort of group hysteria seems to take hold during post-match victory celebrations and they behave more like cavemen than gentlemen. They obviously need the civilising influence of female company in
The game season is upon us, and game is rather shaming. We have so much of it in Britain but we don’t cook it very adventurously. This is particularly true of game birds like partridge, quail and wild duck — wonderful birds which deserve better than over-roasting and gooey fruit sauces. Most of the game
English-speakers working in Russia generally go through a stage where they jokingly refer to a restaurant as a pectopah. The joke consists in pronouncing the cyrillic letters as if they were Roman. I was surprised to discover that the Germans fighting in Russia in the second world war made a joke on the same lines
