Life

City life

Confessions of a closeted bourgeois boy

Recently, I got very stoned. I haven’t been that stoned since I was at Woodstock. Or was it the first Glastonbury festival? Or maybe Bob Dylan at the Isle of Wight? I can’t remember, but that’s dope for you. The curious thing is, I don’t take drugs any more. I hate getting high. It’s like

Real life

Wild life

The family water stories that have become legends

Laikipia, Kenya When I met him as a boy, Terence Adamson was an elderly fellow whose face had been half torn away by one of his brother George’s famous lions. His disfigured features made him hard to look at, but Terence taught me how to dowse for water. He’d pick up any old stick and

More from life

‘Delicious, not glamorous’: how to make a pot roast

A pot roast is probably the antithesis of glamorous cooking. But that’s also sort of the point. For as long as we’ve been cooking meat, we’ve looked for ways to make the tougher cuts more tender and succulent. It’s the kind of cooking that every culture around the world has developed individually, a way of

Wine Club

How to celebrate in style

It was Mrs Ray’s birthday the other day. Or rather it was what she now terms her birthday week – seven days during which flags fly, trumpets sound, corks pop and she can do no wrong. I find it all quite exhausting. It’s not just the running up and down with cups of tea and

No sacred cows

Help! I’m a full-time dad

For the past ten or so years, Caroline has taken herself off to Barbados for two weeks every winter, leaving her long-suffering husband to hold the fort. To be fair, it’s a freebie, so she can hardly be blamed. Her best friend, Bridie, is a tennis instructor and in return for giving lessons to the

Spectator Sport

Formula 1 is a breeding ground for scandal

Well, who could have guessed it? So the world of Formula 1 isn’t a clean-living sanctuary of good behaviour that makes a Convocation of Bishops look like the court of Caligula. Here’s a slice of F1 life: a prominent motor-racing executive walks into a room of pretty young marketing girls: ‘What’s the difference between an

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: should I work with clients with bad taste?

Q. I used to work for a well-known decorator and have now branched out on my own. Some friends of my parents have asked me if I’d like to redecorate their reception rooms. They’re very nice people and I think they have partly given me the work to help me establish myself. I’m a few

Food

Mind your language

What are frameworks for?

A brand new ‘robust’ framework was being woven and nailed together, so the Prime Minister announced at the end of last week. It’s barely a year since he presented the UK with a similar kind of structure, which he called the Windsor Framework. I imagined it to resemble in some way a Windsor chair. In

Poems

Amoris victima

The office is so full of bloody books, propped dangerously on tables, cases, chairs, propped everywhere, so everywhere one looks one briefly shrugs one’s shoulders and despairs. The drawback to so many bloody books is that they come between us, me and her, and interrupt what should be melting looks with titles unforgivably obscure. Take