Life

High life

New York has cancelled Mozart

Gstaad This is the best news since the Bush-Blair duo saved us from the nuclear holocaust Saddam was about to unleash upon us. Half a Unwanted electric cars pile up everywhere but the government has gone as deaf as Beethoven million, perhaps even one million dead Iraqis later, we were nevertheless saved with minutes to

Real life

Our favourite beach has been destroyed

‘Ukraine Family – Welcome You,’ said the ungrammatical sign at the entrance to the car park of our favourite West Sussex beach. The rest of the beach was like a bomb had hit. Mounds of shingle had risen up like statues of mythical creatures We had arrived for a sentimental visit that might be our

More from life

My two tips for perfect aubergine parmigiana

In the middle of an unpredictable Indian summer, here is a recipe from sultry southern Italy which is suitable for the changing seasons. While aubergine parmigiana (or parmigiana di melanzane) was born of hot Italian summers, it is also perfect for autumn, as the days shorten and darken. There is inherent comfort in the hot,

Wine Club

Private Cellar have winkled out some real wonders

I’m just back from a week in Alsace and I can’t stop grinning. It’s my favourite of all French wine regions, ridiculously pretty and warmly welcoming. The winemakers are just so genial and – unlike many other regions we can all think of – inherently collaborative, forever bigging up the wares of their rivals, who

No sacred cows

The myth of male privilege

A few weeks ago I had a crack at coming up with my own sociological ‘law’ and my first effort went as follows: ‘The more progressive a country is when it comes to sex and gender, the more authoritarian it is when it comes to speech and language.’ I was thinking of Ireland which, having

Spectator Sport

Novak Djokovic, the man who won’t go away

‘What are you still doing here?’ joked Daniil Medvedev to Novak Djokovic after their US Open tennis final – a lung-busting baseline slugfest featuring jaw-dropping athleticism and brilliant shot-making – had ended in a straight sets win for the Serb. It was his 24th Grand Slam victory. There’s no sign that Djokovic wants to slow

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: should I admire a friend’s new fake breasts?

Q. As a male, what is the protocol when confronted with the noticeably bigger boobs of a platonic friend of 40 years’ standing? I have been told about them by mutual friends and will shortly be seeing them for myself when she and her husband come to stay. I usually compliment her on her appearance

Food

Mind your language

Why do we swipe left?

Beau Brummell, denouncing the fashion for a vegetable diet, was asked if he had never tried it himself: ‘Oh yes, I remember I once ate a pea.’ His remark sounded funnier then, because the normal way of talking about the little green spheres was as a collective, pease, as in pease pudding. Brummell was not

Poems

Impassioned

Joel tried his hand at acting,appeared as one of the gravediggers in Hamlet,an amateur production on the Isle of Man.Audience applause remained polite. Backstage, Albert, the other gravedigger,was reading Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. Joel looked at himself in the dressing room mirror —Nose broken in a lunchtime fight with Higgins in Year 11—Joel had

Railings

Young and too much lip,I’m stuck on railings, up and down the slip roadsor round the parks: topping and tailing from a paint kettle,mindful of bounding dogs, that my trailing leg might topplethe gallon stock can. I’m a gardener as well,hacking back brambles and nettles, freeing the bottom plinths.Exposed: no place to shelter or skive,

Accompaniment

Stood for ages waiting for the sun to turn up and pay homage to a clutch of brilliant orange poppies. It declined. But the poppies couldn’t be bothered to get hung up on feelings of betrayal and bobbed about — ditsy and undimmed — perhaps slightly drunk on some fringe classic I couldn’t catch beneath