Gstaad ‘Living my life in person’ is not a redundancy of expression. What it actually means is living without social media. Why have I chosen the unplugged life? That’s an easy one to answer, but first a little history: I think I was the last one to switch to writing on a word processor when
I remember my first day at South Benfleet County Primary School with rare clarity. My mother left me at the school gate and I hadn’t been in the playground five minutes when a supervising woman trotted up to me, suspended me in the air by my arm, and slapped my leg, hard. Apparently I ought
The county council insist the unmade track leading to my house is nothing to do with them, while the parish council change their position depending on how they feel on the day. If they want to boss us about, they infer they are leasing the land from Surrey county council, along with the rest of
Last week, the Office for National Statistics published the data on gender identity in England and Wales, as revealed in the latest UK census. For the first time ever, the census included the following question: ‘Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?’ This was asked of those aged
Q. One of the most widely adored people I know is a single man in his fifties. He is brilliant and charming but neurotic about money – all our mutual friends joke about his ‘dusty wallet’. I have just heard from one of these, who had him to stay for five days after Christmas. He
I am occasionally teased. In a column devoted to drink, which in practice usually means wine and often the products of Bordeaux to give one plenty of scope, I am accused of divergence towards the byways and wildernesses of vinous intellectual life. But as we approached glorious festivals, surely events themselves would impose their own
‘Is it sponsored by the oil people?’ my husband asked as we drove into London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone, past a sign: ‘ULEZ.’ Naturally his words reflected mental confusion, but I had some sympathy for his presumption that the acronym was pronounced to rhyme with the French verb culer, ‘make sternway’. By oil he was
Chichester to London Victoria They feel the same, the missing and the found, once empty stillness settles in the mind and dulls the edge of every loss you find. These glancing lights more serious than they seem, which tell a stranger’s age though not their name, something of living have:
The shepherds are on quad bikes. They wear Adidas and drink Black Sheep. Still, only they know the tenderness of hills: fleecy skies, the shiver of gorse; empty lanes and the prayer of a winter dawn. Their angels are on Instagram; their psalms are by Dave. They dream of glad tidings: Lotto numbers daubed
Recently Chinese 11-year-olds faced the following question in a maths exam. ‘If a ship has 26 sheep and ten goats on board, how old is the ship’s captain?’ Chinese social media lit up with parents furious at their little emperors being asked a question they could not answer. The BBC did find one Weibo user
Like most people in racing I began 2023 down in the dumps, moaning about insufficient prize money, small fields and declining crowds. Gloom only intensified with racing’s administrators, the British Horseracing Authority, yet again forced into a humiliating U-turn on new rules it had proposed governing jockeys’ use of the whip, doing so just days
