Looking back and trying to choose just one out of those incomparably bewitching women of one’s youth can be tricky. Giselle was definitely one of them – blonde, French, mesmeric, an apparition – but so was Kiki, very white-skinned, also French, patrician and very sexy. They were friends, those two, but they fell out after
All afternoon I had been horizontal next to an electric fan, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake and sometimes halfway between those two states. By six o’clock the temperature had relented from 38 degrees to a comparatively easier 27 and I heard ice cubes tinkling into a glass. Catriona called up the stairs, offering gin. I said
The British Gas engineers arrived in convoy, and the dust from their tyres flew into the air as they came down the track. If this boiler service had a theme tune it would be Ennio Morricone’s ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’. The engineers parked up and got out of their vans in a
I grew up by the seaside. More precisely, I grew up near South Shields, on the north-east coast – somewhere which is British summer beach country for one, maybe two days a year, and salt-lashed and grey for the rest of it. But come rain or shine, ice cream is a permanent fixture. Ice cream
It’s started again. Sixteen years ago, another ‘Toby Young’ kept appearing in my email inbox. I’d created a Google Alert telling the search engine to send me an email every time my name popped up on the internet, but this Toby turned out to be a 47-year-old woman who was running the dog rehabilitation programme
Q. This year once again my company took a small group of clients to lunch at Royal Ascot. Our guests included a couple of former clients we asked along for old times’ sake. These have both written not only to thank us but to say we can count them in for next year’s lunch as
‘Club’ is a four-letter word. Whenever a club is mentioned in the press, it will inevitably be portrayed as a sinister meeting place where men gather in secret to plot against the common weal. If only. The main point about all clubs is that they are fun. That is true in St James’s. It is
Before pinch as a verb appears in any written sources, it already formed part of surnames. Hugo Pinch was walking, breathing and possibly pinching in 1190, and in 1220 in Oxfordshire Ralph Pinchehaste was repenting at leisure. When William Golding wrote the painful Pincher Martin, he knew that any sailor called Martin was nicknamed Pincher.
I send you this bouquet, which my own hands just culled from the marvellous bed; if spring’s not gathered tonight, I said, tomorrow her beauty will have flown. Let its light serve as a sermon then, how your charms flourishing their fair May shall soon be invested with frost-grey and, bit by bit, become
Firm pillows stacked high for hope to rest on, each calling out against nightmare and fear. Courage has determined this towering resistance so may it hold firm and remain until dawn for the light to discover a mended nation whose cities awake from their troubled sleep.
In the 1980s, the great advertising writer John Webster described the following paradox. As he saw it, the dream of everyone in advertising was to work hard for many years, ultimately winning enough accounts and awards to retire to a French farmhouse where they could wake to the smell of fresh bread and black coffee,
Heading for a holiday in Sardinia, I remembered that the last time we were there our engine-less, drifting boat was rescued by a Mr Dettori. Mrs Oakley’s relief was tempered only by my disappointment that our saviour wasn’t Frankie or even a relative. This time it looks as though it is Frankie, the world’s favourite
