Gstaad When Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet committed suicide just before Christmas, I hoped against hope that others would do the same. No such luck. Villehuchet was an aristocrat, a gentleman and an honest man. He felt responsible for the loss of $1.4 billion and he took the honourable way out. I did not know
It was minus four degrees, dampness hung in the air, and visibility was down to about 120 yards. As I drove up on to Dartmoor with fog lamps on, wipers going, and heater and blower at full blast, I didn’t anticipate that this year’s New Year’s Day ‘Get Fit For 2009’ guided walk on Dartmoor
There were four brothers. They’d just been left their uncle’s farm in his will, a few dozen acres of Leicestershire. It was a fairly standard small-farm package. They’d all grown up with the place, working there through the summers: a red-brick farmhouse, pretty but practically derelict with a mixed bag of cute, lopsided outbuildings —
Eos is a word I struggled with, presuming it to derive from the Greek prefix, eo-, meaning dawn or beginning, particularly in relation to plant or animal life. Then I discovered Eos was goddess of the dawn, beloved by (rather too) many Titans, though it could also refer to a bankrupt airline or the European
The recession is not a ‘much-needed reality check’ — it’s a source of great suffering Puritans love disasters. No sooner has some calamity befallen mankind than some hair-shirted scold emerges from his priest hole and starts wagging his finger. The message is always the same: ‘You are being punished for your immoral lifestyle.’ The latest
Cricket’s ‘golden age’ You have to hand it to Kevin Pietersen. He’s certainly got chutzpah — or should that be a death wish? Just when you might think he’d be happy, having finally won the battle to take part in the Indian Premier League, he’s gone and started another fight, but this time it was
Q. A friend from university invited my boyfriend and me to stay with her parents in a very grand house over New Year. We were made very welcome, but my boyfriend felt out of his depth in at least one instance and wonders what you would have advised. On New Year’s Day there was a
When Veronica came to stay, over the New Year, we watched one of those late-night television programmes designed for drunk young people. It was a compilation of popular virals. (Viral has not yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary as a noun, but was added in 2006 as a adjective that describes marketing by
