Kent To this beautiful New England village near the New York–Connecticut border, home to the great designer Oscar de la Renta and his wife Annette, both very old friends of mine. Two even older friends, Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera, were already there, making it a perfect house party. The de la Renta house is a
I played my youthful cricket on wickets which were cut into steeply sloping pitches. Cover drives which should have raced over the outfield either thumped into the hillside or sailed out into space, and batsmen, who believed that they had perfected the backwards defensive shot, were regularly caught by fielders who had taken up a position ten
I was sorry to miss last week’s ghostbusting gig at the Hay-on-Wye festival when David Beckham’s surrogate-scribbler, actor-writer Tom Watt, joined two mates of mine, Paul Hayward (Sir Bobby Robson, Michael Owen) and Peter Burden (novelist-amanuensis of horseracing’s Francome and Pitman, and vet-thesps Hemmings and Phillips). Ghostwriting has a long literary history, but suddenly there’s
Q. One of the most characteristic aspects of being a member of the British middle class ‘nouveau pauvre’ is finding it embarrassing to take action when things we used to take for granted as a free service are now very expensive. I have paid over £3,000 to our (private) dentist for our younger son to
This is about a mother who takes her son out for dinner for his 15th birthday. Normally the son would not agree to go out for dinner with his mother. Normally the son treats his mother as something of an embarrassment, as well as a middle-aged nag, drag and bore. The mother is perplexed by
I heard someone on the wireless, in talking about the Freedom of Information Act, refer to the ‘information-requesting community’, as if they all lived together and had much in common. You could, though, legitimately refer to me as a member of the annoyed community. I do have something in common with thousands of readers and
