Life

Dolce vita

Nicholas Farrell

The slippery business of catching a snake

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna It is strange how events elide and create a pattern whose significance remains elusive. I had just returned from a raid under the cover of the night on a huge field near our house a mile from the sea. I had about 50kg of ripe tomatoes in plastic bags in the back

Real life

My run-in with Greta Thunderpants

The anger management counsellor stormed through the door and shouted at me to turn the heating up. Hello to you too, I thought, but I was polite because I realise we are going to get difficult customers doing B&B in West Cork, where tourists come from all over the world. At first, however, I didn’t

Wine Club

Wine Club: top-flight wines for Christmas from Armit

Mrs Ray has had a minor op on her foot and, temporarily unable to walk, is marooned on the first floor. Don’t worry, I do visit. My dear wife’s exile upstairs does mean, though, that there’s a certain amount of flexibility as to what goes on downstairs. Indeed, I’ve been able to sneak in one

No sacred cows

Did I deny my son a shot at the Premier League?

When my youngest son Charlie was seven he was talent-spotted by a QPR scout who saw him playing football in the park and invited to try out for the junior academy. I struggled to take this seriously – he still couldn’t ride a bicycle – but duly turned up at a ‘sports academy’ in Willesden,

Dear Mary

Drink

How Maggie took her whisky

The whirligig of time brings in his… astonishments. Who would have thought it? Even a couple of decades ago, the notion that the Tory party could be led by a black woman would have seemed incredible. I remember 1975, and the doubts that were expressed about Margaret Thatcher: much louder than any adverse comment about

Mind your language

Does ‘nestled’ offend you?

‘Shockin’!’ exclaimed my husband, almost biting a chunk out of his whisky glass. I had read to him an enquiry from Michael Howard KC, leader of the Admiralty Bar since 2000. ‘As your husband does not seem to have been enraged yet by the use of nestled as a (presumably) transitive verb in the passive

Poems

Las cabras son malas

here come the billygoats down the track so heavily hung with dongs that dangle down in the dust and balls that swing from side to side to clonkerty bells that roll and toll on their necks the melody ripples into the stone pine fragrance cypress shadows the nannies plunging onward struggling big with milk so

From Anno Domini MCMXXI

by Anna Akhmatova Somehow we pulled off becoming apart, Snuffed out our awful hot light. Perennial enemy, it’s time you were taught how someone can love someone right. I’m willing. To me it’s all fun, I’m game: At night, the easeful Muse careers Down to me here, and in the morning Fame Trudges in, rattles

The Cooling Sand

The beach magician’s vanished, gone home. Now it’s my sleeping cousins’ turn to disappear.                              Out of the creaking depths of old deckchairs their teenage spirits rise, drift down to the shore.                                                    The mackerel are in. Helen’s in blue, Cat in her yellow dress. The harbour’s a pond, the moored boats nailed to their

The Wiki Man

How to buy a house that isn’t on the market

There are many, mutually reinforcing causes of the property crisis: it is too easy to borrow; there are too many people; there aren’t enough houses; what houses do exist are in the wrong place; and many houses have the wrong people living in them. Solutions exist to all of these, some of which involve building