New York It’s party time in the Bagel, and also the last week I’ll be spending in this unrefined place. The Bagel has lost its je ne sais quoi for me. It is now as subtle as a knocked-out Russian T-72 stuck in the mud. There’s as much wit around here as there used to
Sometimes, when the weather is fine, Treena calls up the stairs: ‘Why don’t you sit out on the terrace and get a bit of sun?’ Our little terrace faces nearly due south over the village pantiles and a succession of forested ridges as far as the littoral mountain range. It’s a sheltered, sunny spot with
‘Then I got taken hostage in Iran,’ said the lady sitting next to me in the hairdresser’s as she was having her hair crimped. ‘Really?’ said the hairdresser, who had the flat irons on her hair and was making her look like an 1980s pop star. ‘And how was that?’ He was obviously stuck in
‘This dish is very you,’ my husband says, as I serve up 650g of melted, boozy cheese to the two of us for a weekday lunch, alongside a teetering pile of bread cubes. He is, I’m afraid, right: it really is my favourite kind of eating. There’s nothing better than a communal pot in the
So this is it folks, the last offer of the year. James Franklin of Corney & Barrow and I worked tirelessly to bring you the tastiest, most Yule-appropriate wines we could at the best possible prices. Indeed, so fine and so well-priced are they that I barely bothered the spittoon while tasting them and will
According to a quote in a recent article by the environment editor of the Times, I’m ‘the most prominent UK public figure’ whose posts on Twitter related to ‘climate scepticism’ are ‘heavily shared’. This was based on an analysis commissioned by the paper from two researchers at the University of London, Max Falkenberg and Andrea
Q. I’m dreading Christmas because my darling partner’s two middle-aged children (both unmarried) are coming to stay and they don’t get on. I don’t want to seem inhospitable by not offering them plenty to drink, but drink does always seem to be the trigger for their rows. What do you recommend, Mary? – Name and
Mriya lives at the end of Old Brompton Road where South Kensington turns into Earl’s Court and, as if by some alchemy, becomes interesting. It is a Ukrainian restaurant, but something more touching too: a memorial and a retreat. It opened in August, in the sixth month of Putin’s war. Twelve of its 15 staff
Something has gone wrong with the use of quite. Someone wrote in the Telegraph: ‘Beating Brazil at a World Cup? Quite the experience.’ Then I heard: ‘It’s been quite the dreich day.’ The annoying part is the the. An idiom does exist with quite the, but the meaning is different. If my husband displayed his
The festival ended aeons ago but the queue haunts on between two fields to a meadow. Only a few ahead of us now, jovial, as if the rusty clang- clang tolled fresh vows. A sapling thrills in the breeze like a dog shaking off a river. Children lose themselves in trees. And now that
(after Heine) I saw the elves in the wood last night, riding in the light of the moon; I heard their little horns ring out, their bony bells’ portentous tune. They spurred past me as swift as thought on mice whose antlers shone like gold; those steeds flew silently as swans, wild swans that range
In early 2020 my family and I were due to fly home from visiting a friend in Oman when the plane encountered a technical problem. We returned to departures and were rebooked on to a flight the following day. British Airways then sent us to a very decent hotel, where we were given rooms and
After an autumn of no shows and poor attendances that was more like it. A decent crowd at Sandown Park on Betfair Tingle Creek Day had plenty to cheer about including a definitive victory in the feature race by Alan King’s Edwardstone, which stamped him as the best two-miler around, and a dazzling round of
