Memories for me are like beautifully edited copy: all cleaned up and retaining only the good parts. The wife tells me that I’m quite lucky in choosing to remember just pleasant things, and of course I agree. Actually it’s not really a choice; it is almost automatic. Bad things are tucked away immediately, never to
With a French health card everything is free for us cancer patients, even taxis to and from the hospital. ‘This is the longest taxi ride I’ve ever taken in my life,’ I said to last week’s driver, Virginie, on the outward leg of our three-hour round trip to the hospital at Marseille. ‘Your poor French
The two-acre smallholding lived up to its name in being very, very small indeed. We had to squeeze around the front door one at a time to get into the entrance hall, which was also the front room and the entry to the stairway. It was a red-brick semi in a row of cottages on
We had the first of our new season’s Spectator Winemaker’s Lunches last week and what a rip-roaring, shirt-popping success it was. Held in the Jacobite Room of Boisdale Belgravia (our extremely congenial temporary home while the unfortunate flood in our boardroom dries out), it featured the extraordinary wines of Joseph Phelps Vineyards in California and
For the founders of the West London Free School, of which I was one, last Thursday should have been a moment of great pride. We gathered in the assembly hall, surrounded by the politicians and officials who’d helped us, to celebrate the school’s tenth anniversary and reflect on what we’d achieved. Not only has the
Not many people would have seen that coming. I’m talking of course of last Saturday evening and the women’s final at the US Open. Who would have guessed what the lady did next? She sat down and wrote Emma Raducanu a letter. OK, it probably wasn’t the Queen who wrote it. Some flunky would have
Q. I recently attended a wedding which was (for me) quite ‘grand’, with a church ceremony followed by a reception. I cleared my diary for the weekend. The wedding, in Exeter, was organised by wedding planners who inundated me with pieces of paper and emails about the logistics, but on arriving at the church and
The residents of Mayfair are misnamed: they do not really live here. They live in Mayfair like I live on the A30 roundabout near Morrisons or in dreamland. I am sometimes on the A30 roundabout near Morrisons and sometimes in dreamland but only -sporadically. It would be ludicrous to suggest that either is my permanent
I was rolling out some pastry that had been cooling its pudgy heels in the fridge when voices on the wireless began discussing whether Priti Patel would roll out ‘controversial new tactics to turn migrants back mid-Channel’. I felt that our rolling roles belonged to different realms. For pastry, I have a rolling pin. How
The emphasis may all be on speed horses these days, with breeders interested only in horses that struggle to get a yard more than ten furlongs without the aid of a horsebox. But I remain a devotee of the St Leger, the last and longest of the English Classics run at Doncaster over a mile
