Life

High life

Mailer and me

New York Three months before the Americans committed their greatest foreign policy blunder ever, I had gone up to Cape Cod to interview Norman Mailer. Towards the end of his life, Norman called himself a left-conservative, and went as far as to agree that losing one’s culture through immigration was not a good thing. But

Low life

Paying through the teeth

I’m in agony. I’m in agony. Toothache. Upper left molar. The pain is shooting up the side of my face and stabbing through my left eye socket. On the plus side, the world is suddenly less complex. My idea of future happiness has been reduced to nothing more ambitious than a pain-free existence. No longer

Real life

Women’s ways

Silly really. Although it seemed like a good idea at the time. A girls’ poker evening. I forgot that trying to persuade a group of women to do anything involving a certain absence of men is like trying to get them to turn up to their own funeral. I’ve tried to organise these sorts of

More from life

Confessions of a tyreophile

At Oxford I had a clerical friend, a mature postgraduate and student of 19th-century evangelism, who developed a temporary but consuming passion for car tyres. Unlike his more lasting passions for tobacco, alcohol and (I believe) cannabis, his enthusiasm for tyres was as great as his ignorance; he didn’t know a cross-ply from a radial.

Mellow weedlessness

The party is almost over. One of the best autumns for many years is coming to an end, the leaves finally seared off the trees by stormy weather. Even people who do not generally notice these things have been moved to comment on the richness and variety of the colours of trees and shrubs, in

Wine Club

Spectator Mini-Bar Offer | 17 November 2007

Years ago, during what had become an intolerably hot summer, we found ourselves in a pub garden in a village near the Thames. We were all dressed in minimal clothing — shorts, T-shirts and sandals. Even so we felt suffocatingly hot. At a table nearby a group were waiting for guests, who turned out to

Spectator Sport

Counting the cost | 17 November 2007

The to-and-fro of the 2012 Olympic Games’s accounting transparency (or otherwise) continues to be what old sportswriters used to call ‘a ding-dong contest’. The to-and-fro of the 2012 Olympic Games’s accounting transparency (or otherwise) continues to be what old sportswriters used to call ‘a ding-dong contest’. The shrill voice of the government’s Olympic minister Tessa

Dear Mary

Your problems solved | 17 November 2007

Q. A dinner-party guest rang me three hours before the dinner for ten I was giving as a thank-you to her and her husband to say that as soon as she arrived at my flat, at 8.30, she would have to use my computer to bid for some curtains on eBay. How should I have

Mind your language

Mind your language | 17 November 2007

Hansard does not show that, when the acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, Dr Vincent Cable (as he likes to be called, having a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Glasgow), made his response to Mr Gordon Brown’s speech in the debate on the Loyal Address, something went wrong that took the steam out