Gstaad During these dark, endless periods of lockdown, let’s take a trip down memory lane to a time when we still had real high life: parties galore, carefree girls in their summer dresses, and drunken dawns playing polo in dinner jackets. Life forms began to move properly about 500 million years ago, but I will
Seven bells. Pitch dark still. I descend the creaking wooden stairs in the darkness, let the dog out, make tea and toast, put a pan of porridge and the coffee pot on the stove and download the Times newspaper on to the iPad. I read it from cover to cover. Every news story and comment
Eventually, I got so bored I ended up at Burger King. For no other reason than to amuse myself one evening, after doing next to nothing all day, I entered the car park of the Ladymead retail park outside Guildford. I wasn’t hungry but I convinced myself I would like a bean burger, because it
Malindi, Kenya I’ve learned that mourning must be tackled ever so gently. As a younger man, when friends were killed in Africa’s wars I’d become angry and drink. When Dad died I cut adrift in Yemen for a time. Following Mum’s death a month ago, I decided to stay quietly at her home on the
I don’t know about you but I’m now comfortably back in the saddle after a serious but ultimately doomed attempt at dry January. My corkscrew and I are inseparable friends once more and it’s as if I’d never been away. Wet February here I come! I ache for uncorking time — which Mrs Ray and
The wine has been flowing in the Young household this week. The reason I’ve been celebrating is because I managed to get through January without a drink. Like many people, I try to do this every year, but it felt like a particular achievement this year because of the lockdown Boris announced on 4 January.
Q. My husband has always worked extremely hard and now does so from home — so I go to great lengths to make nice things for him to eat. Yet he takes five minutes, at most, to eat these elaborate and lovingly prepared dishes, and then immediately goes through to the kitchen and starts washing
Later this week, on Spectator.co.uk, I will resolve a mystery that has featured in a lot of Zoom traffic around St James’s — plus a lesser–known puzzle. The first: why has Anderson been absent from The Spectator? The second: why has he been more or less off the grog for a month? The two are
I agree with Charles Moore (The Spectator, 6 February) that it is a shame the Times is dropping its use of titles of courtesy — Mrs, Mr, Lord — at the second mention of anyone in a report. Now it’s Charles Moore first mention, and Moore after that. Even when I see Jane Austen referred
Absorbed by the TV in the corner, the pair of us on the sofa – but what of the space in between? The introduction of a rug or low table, nothing to obscure the picture. An emptiness remains: colourless, formless in either light or dark. Neither any use for it nor to it, we stare
The fall of a girl’s hair, the flare of a skirt –the merciless daily things that break your heartare there for you to learn your skills from. The hurtof living is what stings us into art. Cool your desires to ice, then start to play.Compose it all like music: use what you need:secrets; strange worlds;
i.m. Colin Falck (1934-2020) It arrived, a something out of nothing, to becomeThe last good poem you would make, as, out of the dumbSilence, words, knowing they belonged to other words,Lit and jostled on the lines, the end of season birdsAlong the wires which as one will rise and flock,Shaping the surrounding air to the
The phrase ‘rich people’s problems’ has its uses. I once overheard a group in a Knightsbridge restaurant sympathising with a companion in tones fit for a bereavement or life-changing injury. ‘Oh, poor you!’ It turned out that their nanny had been ill for two days while they were in Zermatt, and that Farrow & Ball
