Now that the weakest Wimbledon since 1973 – the year of the boycott – is over, a few thoughts about Pam Shriver’s recent revelations that her coach Don Candy, deceased, was also her lover. Candy was 50 at the time, while Pam was 17, which in my book made Candy a lucky guy, assuming it
My days pass largely in a state of inanition. The fit and able-bodied express their sympathy, claiming it’s much the same for them. ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m sleeping all the time.’ ‘Oh, but so are we in this terrible heat!’ Meanwhile the young get browner and more beautiful every day while going on with their
As he grouted the last tile, five years after the bathroom was finished, I knew the game was up. ‘I guess this is it,’ I said, as the builder boyfriend used a filler gun to bring about closure. This single ungrouted tile where the bath meets the wall has been something of a symbolic fight
Order today and use the discount code SPECJULY at the checkout. So, I finally got the plague. No, not monkeypox, the other one – Covid. I blame that Tuscan wedding. Not the hot’n’sweaty event itself, nor the jam-packed flights there and back; no, I blame the three subsequent days on the wagon, strictly enforced by
Have we reached peak woke? In Hollywood, that seems to be the emerging consensus. Thanks to the box office success of Top Gun: Maverick and the disappointing performance of Pixar’s Lightyear, in which Buzz Lightyear’s commanding officer is a black lesbian, the studios think audiences may be tiring of being lectured to. The same is
What separates this year’s ‘empty seats on centre court’ scandal from every other year’s ‘empty seats on centre court’ scandal? Wimbledon has always been a garden party with some tennis thrown in, attended by the least sports-driven crowd in existence – the matrons of Guildford and Godalming who manage to love Rafa and Andy for
Q. I have found parties frustrating this month because they have been too crowded. Is there a polite way to get through a really packed event without stopping to talk to any number of people you know and like and have things to say to, when someone you particularly want to talk to is at
When the Tory party set itself on fire last week a restaurateur told me: ‘Don’t worry, Tanya, we’ll still be here when it’s over.’ She was wrapping a scotch egg as she said it, and it’s very true. There is a soothing continuity to restaurants: no matter what fresh hell, people need to eat. I
There was a word I didn’t understand in Boris Johnson’s resignation speech (in which he did not resign). He spoke of ‘our fantastic prop force detectives’. Prop? Prop forwards, clothes props, proprietors, propositions, propellers? Perhaps they are personal protection officers, though I don’t think those are detectives. Or it might be family slang made up
Just grant me one summer, powerful fates, and a final autumn of lucid song, so that, sated with music’s sweetness, this soul may wholeheartedly die. A poet not wielding his sacred might in life shall find no quiet in Orcus, yet once I have said the holy words I came to say, spoken my
The cab suddenly turning up twenty-seven minutes later after my ten frantic calls from the pavement outside your block, your dressing-gowned silhouette hovering on the balcony, a halo of your wispy hair blonde once more against the dawn. My suitcases thrown in the boot, doors slammed, engine revved, clutch released, I forgot our goodbye
Remember those lanes he walked after work, past the weed-wormed car park at the rusting colliery to the two-street village, to catch the bookies or straight into the Oak. His days governed by dim light: in boiler houses or the single bulb rooms of boarded-up terraces – jobs no one wanted never fazed him.
for Ian Sansom Where was it written that I should measure my middle years by the great blank flowering of these pom-poms – uncanny as domes in a village landscape – whose advance has no warning (one day a sprinkling of warts, the next WE’RE HERE!!!), that love water and pacify the night? They’ve
