Life

High life

In praise of chastity

New York It’s party time in the Bagel, or at least private party time. Yours truly is an extra man nowadays as my wife and I have been separated by pandemic restrictions for six months. Alexandra is in London, quarantining after visiting two little blond things in Austria for my fourth grandchild Theodora’s first birthday.

Low life

The art of negotiating with French nurses

‘Ça va, Monsieur Clarke?’ said a nurse when he noticed I was stirring. It was an effort to speak. ‘Thirsty,’ I croaked. He handed me a graduated test tube containing exactly ten millilitres of warm water. Incredibly, the big clock on the wall said six in the evening. I’d been gone for eight hours. While

Real life

The truth about Surrey’s obsession with horse masks

A saloon car pulled up opposite our fields and a man sat there looking at the horses with a bewildered expression. I had noticed this car meandering along the farm track, driving between the horse fields and stopping every time he came alongside a horse, sitting there for minutes on end. Then he would start

No sacred cows

The curious parable of Dartington

I spent last weekend in south Devon at Dartington, the former estate of Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, and now a charitable trust. I know the place quite well because my father was more or less adopted by the Elmhirsts when he was 14 and I spent four years there as a teenager while he was

Spectator Sport

Ollie Robinson’s ritual humiliation

One of the more egregious innovations of Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution was something called the ‘struggle sessions’. This involved the ritual public humiliation of anybody the local bigwigs had turned against — often in sports stadiums. The elderly Yangtze swimmer would have smiled approvingly at what has happened to Ollie Robinson, the England fast bowler

Dear Mary

Food

A careful parody: Noble Rot Soho reviewed

Noble Rot sits in Greek Street, Soho, on the site of the old Gay Hussar, which squatted here from 1953 like a rebuke. Some people loved this Hungarian ‘left-wing’ restaurant, with its terrible food, its library of Labour-themed political biographies, its raging cartoons and fond memories of Harold Wilson. But you can’t eat political biographies

Mind your language

Poems

Capri (1890)

After the painting by Theodore Robinson Two priests, on the narrow path to heaven, pass a balcony brimming with clementine. Like crows, they glance up, and see a woman with red hair, sipping a glass of Gragnano. She smiles and tells them there is more than one way to the top of the mountain. Ahead,

The Radiator Wall

This one I’ll leave till last,postponing the problems – how the wallpaper will come round the corner and the principal fern in the pattern continues to meet the ceiling,the length staying true to the plumb.Then the trick of guiding it down into darkness so as not to snag and easing it out without tearing,fretting the

The turf

The Derby was a game of musical saddles

We all know it takes courage to win races over jumps, along with athleticism, stamina and speed. But you need courage to win on the Flat too and Adayar showed that in abundance winning this year’s Derby. The aerial shots show vividly the moment, two furlongs from the finish, when early leader Gear Up moved