How do you live with yourself when 179 air passengers are burned alive on a South Korean runway, and you’ve spent the last few weeks binge-watching YouTube videos about plane crashes? The obvious answer is that I need to seek help. I have a defence, but I don’t think any British jury would buy it.
Our house was suddenly shrouded in a thick, grey mass of cloud and it felt like a sea fog had descended. The Irish could not give a damn for rules and regs and no one is going to tell them what they can set fire to To some extent it had, but the fog grew
January kitchens are my favourite. This isn’t anything against Christmas – I love the spice, the frenzy, the ritual of festive cooking, but I also love the aftermath. There’s something calming about the kitchen once it’s all over – nothing is made through obligation, or with a deadline. I embrace the cosiness of autumn and
At 3.28 a.m. on 1 January, I made myself a promise: I would never touch alcohol again. Having over-egged it horribly during the carnage that passed for the neighbours’ NYE party, I had finally come to agree with Dean Wormer’s fabled observation in Animal House, that ‘fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through
So farewell then, Justin Trudeau, last of the lockdown tyrants. Or should that be the last of the democratically elected lockdown tyrants? After all, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are still in office. But setting aside those authoritarians, it’s difficult to think of a single democratic leader apart from Emmanuel Macron who was in power
Q. We live in a harmonious and social community in Berkshire and early last year our fun-loving neighbours invited us to a New Year’s Eve party. However, on about 29 December they packed up and went away, only returning on New Year’s Day. We usually have a bracing walk in the afternoons and are bound
It is extraordinary to remember. When I was a small boy in Scotland, Christmas Day was not a holiday. My father almost closed his office, but someone was on duty. The main festivity was Hogmanay: not a holiday in England. Now the whole country closes down for a fortnight. A friend who is a serious industrialist
The Philip Larkin Society has sponsored a pew in the huge medieval church of Holy Trinity, Hull. Larkin died 40 years ago and in 2017 the church was given the title Hull Minster. Eighteen churches have acquired the honorific minster since 1994. Most are historic civic piles: King’s Lynn and Rotherham, Doncaster and Leeds. The
I do not take you to be my husband or my fiancé, or even now my friend. I do not wish to have or to hold your head at the toilet’s rim. Nor keep you at arm’s length when you were other-him. I’ve had you better and the worst. I’ve certainly had you richer. As
I looked through the window and I saw a sunny day. I say sunny day, but the thing about sun is how it casts shadows. It draws the shape of the house across the patio, and what this shape is is a ghost house, here, creeping its way across these slabs, as the day lengthens,
One of my favourite cartoons shows a couple sitting in luxury at the front of a plane, the wife peeking through the curtains to the cabin behind. ‘I’m so glad we’re in business class, darling,’ she says to her husband. ‘There seems to be some sort of hijacking happening in economy.’ People who have learned
