Gstaad Mercedes Benz heir Mick Flick and I have been friends for more than half a century. We both married Schoenburgs, both like the odd drink, both adore the fair sex, and we are now both candidates for a visit from the man in the white suit, yours truly first in line. Mick gave a
In the New Year I was introduced to a couple who had fled Britain impulsively on New Year’s Eve with just a suitcase each to escape ‘Brexit Britain’. They rented a terraced house in our quartier of the village and had us round for supper, and I also went there to watch football on the
‘I’ve got COPD,’ said a friend of mine, not elaborating at all as I stared at him waiting for him to explain what that stood for. I had to look it up later. His expression told me firmly that everyone was au fait with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. A few hours earlier, another friend had
My daydreams at the moment follow a predictable theme. I am on holiday somewhere balmy, with a carafe of cold white wine in front of me. Someone handsome has just brought me a large bowl of salted crisps, unbidden but very welcome, and the greatest responsibility I have is finishing the book that I’m reading.
Last weekend, Rolling Stone ran a story about an interview an emergency room doctor had given to a local news station in which, according to the TV reporter, he’d said hospitals in his state were so swamped with patients who’d overdosed on ivermectin that gunshot victims were struggling to be seen. For context, ivermectin is
Q. My granddaughter Jane has been asked on a date to the Wolseley by George (both pseudonyms). Although she finds him attractive, and is flattered by the invitation to an institution like the Wolseley, she can’t bring herself to go because of his intensely bad body odour. Mary, how can she accept the invitation while
In London, the weather is a gentle sashaying mockery. An Indian summer reminds us of the sullen apology of summer which we have just endured. Soon it will be winter, and ‘A cold coming we had of it’. As always, poetry is a respite. My first resort is usually Yeats. In English, no one except
When Peter Quennell was sent down from Oxford for consorting with a woman called Cara (by Evelyn Waugh’s account), he joined Sacheverell Sitwell on honeymoon in Amalfi. I don’t know what Mrs Sitwell thought of it. I learnt this odd fact because I was seeing what connection his name had with quenelles, the fashionable dish
We trudged the grounds of a country house under a featureless sky as stark trees bled out with morning rain and what light there was started to die, and every time you grabbed for my hand I felt a little thrill, unmentioned, ineffable.
There are no headless horsemen, White Ladiesor rattling chains in this ghost story;he died in the chair from black lung, coughing;the coal dust that did for him, and the fags. In life, he’d been a nasty piece of work; like those blokes at the pictures my grandmawarned me about in their fetid raincoats,Brylcreemed hair. We
A canny cousin taught me the handshake trick. I was ten or eleven. Small for my age, but quick As a flash, after a smiling approach, I could duck Beneath my arm and get the affable chap Locked in a Half-Nelson. Thing about tricks is You shouldn’t use them too often. This I learnt
‘I Remember Arras’, a sequence in four parts corresponding numerically to the four stanzas of ‘Adlestrop’, imagines Edward Thomas as having survived the war and looking back on his experience in France. The sequence plays fast and loose with some bits and pieces drawn from Thomas’s writings, including his 1917 diary. I ARRAS I remember
Is flexible working better or worse for productivity? What is the correct blend of remote and office work? Billions of once-healthy pixels will die in the conduct of this debate. But is it possible that we are asking the wrong question entirely? Instead of asking the proximate question ‘Do we want our employees to work
