If it hadn’t arrived I’d be dead, but it was hardly welcome: another birthday — 38 years old on 11 August, but for any pedant among you, reverse the numerals and you’ll get it right. Thirty-eight came to me as I was sparring with a young whippersnapper from Norway recently. I was out of breath
A 20-minute drive through quiet country lanes then suddenly a madcap roundabout and teeming new ring road and finally the hospital car park where I leave the car unlocked and the windows down because nobody in their right mind would want to pinch a car as shabby as this. Up the grassy bank, in through
One thing Lorraine Kelly does not say in the Wayfair advert is: ‘What if I fancy getting my money back for an item that hasn’t arrived?’ I guess they’ve only got 30 seconds, and it’s a wee bit complicated. This is a shame because I’ve always rather enjoyed myself on Wayfair. When the wrong bed
Before this year’s Shergar Cup meeting all I had seen of Australian flat jockey Mark Zahra was a memorably painful picture of him at Flemington racecourse on Melbourne Cup day some years ago, his red and white colours almost obliterated beneath the half-tonne bulk of War Story, an accident in which he could well have
Everyone loves Beaujolais. Now come on, don’t be like that! Of course they do! I’m not talking about ropey old Beaujolais Nouveau, that vin ordinaire — vin very ordinaire — of 1980s notoriety; I’m talking about the pukka, old-vine, low-yield, top-notch Beaujolais from one of the ten crus of the region. At their best, these
The Glorious Twelfth this year, signalling the start of the grouse-shooting season, was overshadowed by a Labour party press release demanding a ‘review’ into driven shooting. Labour’s shadow environment secretary Sue Hayman left people in little doubt as to what she expected this review to conclude. ‘The costs of grouse shooting on our environment and
Q. I want my guests to feel welcome when they stay with us and certainly don’t want to nag them. My problem is with some in-laws who I can only describe as ‘un-housetrained’. It’s fine when they are downstairs where I can keep an eye on them, but their bedroom is a problem. Last time
Foolish me. I could have been writing this by the shore of Lake Trasimene, with only one problem: how to transmit it to London. Last time I stayed in the delightful house there, the technology was still in the era of Hannibal’s victory. There was no wifi, only spasmodic mobile-phone reception, and the nearest English
‘What about poetaster, then?’ asked my husband accusingly, looking up from his whisky and the Spectator, in which I’d ruminated on gloomster. He expects me to know the origins of all words, and blames me for their irregularities. I’d long suffered an itch from poetaster. It’s not that I thought it pronounced poe-taster, but that
Recently I suggested a new approach to commuter-train overcrowding. It simply involved reformulating the problem by accepting that not all overcrowding is equally bad: 100 people forced to stand 10 per cent of the time do not experience anything like the same irritation as ten people who have to stand 100 per cent of the
