On board S/Y Bushido I made a resolution long ago never to mention the Olympics — its spirit is on a par with that of Madame Claude, of Paris brothel infamy — but resolutions are made to be broken. With an uncle who competed in Los Angeles in 1932 and Berlin in 1936, and a
At midday, what must have been more or less the entire village gathered around the steps of the village hall (1952) to raise a flute of champagne to Her Majesty, give three ragged cheers, and sing the National Anthem. Then we were herded into the adjacent parish church car park for the parish Diamond Jubilee
You know you’re getting old when the pharmacist puts your medications in a carrier bag. ‘Here you are, dear,’ said the nice lady, who works behind the counter at my local chemist. And she handed me a bag. Now, the exact dimensions of this bag are crucial. I’ve measured it. It is 30cm long, or
As you read this, I’ll be preparing to give an after-dinner speech at one of the oldest prep schools in Kenya. The school motto is Fortuna Favet Fortibus, so my theme is going to be the importance of character. I’m going to ask whether there’s any point in spending upwards of £30,000 a year to
I came down to earth with a thump after the spellbinding Jubilee weekend by attending a Speeding Awareness Course at the Sixfields Football Stadium in Northampton. It lasted four and a quarter hours and was held in the windowless shareholders’ lounge of the Northampton Football Club, not a nice place in which to spend a
One Test series down, one to go. It’s been fun to have the West Indies here this soggy summer. They are not yet fit to lace the rum punch of their predecessors but they’ve been better than some recent vintages of Caribbean cricketer. Now we wait for the main — if truncated — event of
Q. I often have the most fascinating dreams. These are not just run-of-the-mill dreams about flying or losing your teeth, but really amazing blockbusters which go on for hours and hours. Naturally I want to share these riveting nocturnal experiences with others, but I always find that when I try to recount them, while they
Nick Clegg and sex. What doesn’t the dude know about it — he told Piers Morgan he had slept with ‘no more than 30 people’? He recently took his wife, Miriam González Durántez, the best of the political wives (no interviews, no photoshoots and their kid is called something like Zorro) to the ‘sexiest’ restaurant
Yell, which publishes Yellow Pages, is changing its name to Hibu, after seeking ‘an identity to tell our story’. It prefers to spell hibu with a small h. It admits that hibu means nothing (though to me it looks like a mis-spelled French owl), but it knows how it is pronounced: high-boo. If it were
