Gstaad It snowed on the last two days of August up here, and why not? We’ve traded freedom of speech for freedom from speech, so on an upside-down planet, snow in the Alps in August is the new normal. The world is suddenly a grim place, a sick prank when you think about it. It’s
The old dog was in a companionable frame of mind and she trotted along at my side, glancing up now and then at my face with a grin, perhaps with happiness at being out and about in a pleasant temperature in a changing season. Each evening we tread the same 40-minute circuit out of the
A man without a mask appeared to be dying of Covid, or something quite like it, on the London to Guildford train. Hunched double in his seat across the aisle, he groaned as he coughed, gasped as he sneezed, and sniffed as a way of clearing the mess because he hadn’t got a tissue. Sans
Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard political philosopher, has a lot to answer for. Some armchair psychologists think the reason I turned away from journalism to become a free-school evangelist in 2009 is that I wanted to make my late father proud. He helped set up the Open University, among other things. No doubt there’s something
You suspect that a bar of duty-free Toblerone, no matter how supersized, wouldn’t really do the trick when hapless England footballing star Phil Foden flew home from Iceland to his long-term girlfriend Rebecca, mother of their 18-month-old son. You can only wish him all the best. Foden, 20, and Mason Greenwood, 18, who are huge
Q. I have just been out to my first lunch in months. Ten of us sat around a table in a beautiful garden with wonderful food and good company. My problem was that I couldn’t fully enjoy the occasion because I felt self-conscious. I could think of nothing to say to either of the (first-rate)
A ghost review, now, of a ghost restaurant: the Connaught Grill, which is yet to reopen after pandemic shuttered its renovated self, which opened only in January this year. Cut off at the knees then; or strangled at birth. It feels apt to review something thwarted. I heard it may reopen for Halloween. I hope
Political commentators love talking about the optics — the way something looks to voters. Just at the moment, though, everyone seems to be talking about upticks. Usually it is to do with local increases in coronavirus cases. But my husband, not above reading the sports pages, found that Juventus was wondering whether Cristiano Ronaldo had
