Friends who were among the last to leave Palataki at New Year tell me there were stragglers waiting to be admitted, and this was as the sun was coming up on the first day of the year. My chalet, in other words, has become the last refuge of the desperate, or among those with twice
Waiting at a country bus stop in a downpour. Not sure if I’ve just missed one. No raincoat. No phone signal. Two o’clock in the afternoon and already too dark to write a will. No wonder everyone that can do leaves the country at this time of the year. There isn’t a bus shelter so
The Bupa Blooper. In years to come, that is how I shall refer to what happened when I inadvertently cancelled my health insurance policy, with what certain people seemed to think were hilarious consequences. It all began when my policy came up for renewal and I tried to change my direct debit mandate so that
William Rees-Mogg, who has died, the Oxford-educated member of an old Somerset family, was widely seen as the archetypal ‘gentleman journalist’, but he aspired to be rather grander than that. Even before he became editor of the Times in 1967 he had upstaged his landowning forebears by buying himself an enormous 18th-century country house, Ston
I’m currently in Kenya with my wife and four children and have just returned from the coast where we spent four nights at the Serena Hotel in Mombasa. My only complaint is that all the DVDs in the Kids’ Club were pirate copies — a bit off, considering the hotel is owned by the Aga
Sad times for The Times, and for the game of cricket, with the passing within days of each other of William Rees-Mogg and Christopher Martin-Jenkins. Both men represented, besides the potency of the double-barrelled surname, a specific and wholly admirable strand of Englishness. They had unfailing good manners, and though very posh were never snobbish.
Q. Just before Christmas I ran into a senior executive at a rival firm to the one where I currently work. She asked would I be interested in a job she thought she might have coming up and I said yes. I have heard nothing and I cannot casually inquire when bumping into her as,
How many restaurants make a chain? If the number is four, then Hawksmoor, the superb chop-house named for the Baroque architect Nicholas Hawskmoor, has collapsed on a pile of cheques, the dirty girl, and is now officially a chain, embracing the inevitable suck of cash. It has added to its venues at Guildhall, Spitalfields and
In the series of radio programmes on culture, a guest of Melvyn Bragg’s declared that the distinction between high and low culture was never strict, as a Wagner opera was first performed in a music hall. This is to suggest that music halls always offered acrobats and performing dogs. But the Liverpool Music Hall, for
