Provence My eldest daughter’s husband is from Como. In the early 2000s George Clooney caused a stir in the town when he bought a villa on the lakeside nearby, triggering what’s become known as the Clooney effect – a rise in house prices and the number of ‘bougie’ shops and restaurants catering for an increasing
‘Zip my head in,’ he said, after climbing into a white jumpsuit with a mesh helmet. It was a beekeeper’s outfit, but the effect was less apicultural and more like the scene in E.T. where the special agents in biohazard suits come for the alien. The builder boyfriend was struggling with the zip around his
Good God, there’s a lot of guff being talked about the Online Safety Act. This was a piece of legislation passed by the previous government to make the UK ‘the safest place in the world to go online’. To free speech advocates like me, that sounded ominous, given that ‘safety’ is always invoked by authoritarian
Q. I have been pitched into a social dilemma regarding Glyndebourne, which I live near to but don’t go to often. A friend (who lives in Kent) asked me a while ago to be his plus-one at a young person’s wedding local to me. He mentioned he might try to get two last-minute tickets for
What goes best with a broken rib? The answer, I think, is any drink you enjoy that will not make you laugh. I was strolling along to Richmond station after spending the night with old friends. (Very Jorrocksian: ‘Where I dines, I sleeps.’) I was carrying a scruffy overnight bag containing one shirt, one pair
In The Importance of Being Earnest Jack Worthing was given his surname by Mr Thomas Cardew, who happened to have a first-class ticket for Worthing in his pocket when he found him in the cloakroom at Victoria station – the Brighton line. When told, Lady Bracknell exclaimed: ‘The line is immaterial!’ This turns out not
Thick furry balaclava’d neck. Shaggy charcoal pelt. A cream hairstreak, wings fringed with cork, and feathery snow-shoes on its head. It came in a gale – fooled by a moony lamp – and stayed a week on the sill outside the chair you’d take. With gale after gale more of the moth was lost, antennae
For G.D.M. To walk around Dreamland and not take the rides: not much of a plan but the man’s face changed all that, took me back to a candy floss summer when I learnt to spin sugar from a boy who looked the same as this guy who stood by the sign ready to start
holds no truck with comparisons. Holds no truck with anything much besides sunlight and dust swirls and the breezy clip -clop-clip of heels upon endless parquet. The Second Longest Corridor does not deceive itself. Knows there are sidelong glances, spindly remarks (also-ran, windy thing) from those who complain that it drags on so — can’t
Every time I write about electric cars, there is an explosion of hostile comments online in which readers angrily denounce electric vehicles and the people who drive them. Much of this animus rests on a plausible yet mistaken assumption – that EV owners are all passionate environmentalists, sanctimoniously swanning around in their zero–emission vehicles while
