Life

High life

High life | 17 January 2019

Gstaad   Do any of you know what cisgender is? I just found out. Cisgender is a term that describes someone whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. Amazing, isn’t it, that we now need a pleonasm for saying that someone’s a man or a woman? I sometimes envy my low

Low life

Low life | 17 January 2019

We drove down from the hills to visit friends of friends with a house by the sea and on the journey I experienced all the usual mixed feelings of a trip to the coast. On departure: the not unsnobbish excitement at the prospect of a day out on the glamorous French Riviera. On arrival: the

Real life

Real life | 17 January 2019

Splitting the atom is nothing compared to figuring out how to get hold of your farrier. Why is the farrier more capricious than a rock star? Why does he hardly ever turn up on the day, much less time, he says he is coming? Why does he not keep a diary? Why does he never

More from life

The turf | 17 January 2019

‘Deer-stalking would be a very fine sport,’ W.S. Gilbert once observed, ‘if the deer had guns too.’ We who love jump racing have to acknowledge that there are plenty of folk out there who feel that horses, too, are helpless victims with no alternative but to hurl themselves at obstacles to profit heartless owners, trainers

Wine Club

Gillette and the rise of woke capitalism

The politicisation of consumer products is one of the weirder developments of recent years. First, Oreos came out in support of gay rights. Then Nike extolled us to ‘believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything’, in its multimillion-dollar campaign with controversial former NFL star Colin Kaepernick. Now Gillette has launched a new advert

Who can spare us from this Brexit disaster?

God help us all, because no-one else can or will in these present circumstances. If you wished to apportion some blame for the shambolic state of British politics these days you will not be short of candidates to bear some measure of the opprobrium they all, to one degree or another, deserve. Spare us from

Theresa May’s confidence vote problems will only get worse

Theresa May is in a peculiar position after suffering the largest government defeat in history. Her Brexit plans look dead in the water and even she appeared to admit that she would now have to reach out to members of other parties and consider her options. In a bid to capitalise on May’s misfortune, Jeremy

Wine Club 19 January

Well, I’m glad that’s over. Christmas and New Year’s Eve that is. What a ghastly palaver. It went on for months and even though it’s finally done and dusted, we’re still picking pine needles out from under the blasted sofa and ploughing our way through seemingly endless bowls of defrosted stilton soup. And what on

No sacred cows

I see no signs of civilisation crumbling

There’s a scene in Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s masterpiece about the collapse of western civilisation, in which a particularly sadistic boy named Roger starts to throw stones at a weaker, younger lad called Henry. Yet when he tries to hurt the boy, he finds he cannot do it. ‘Roger gathered a handful of

Dear Mary

Dear Mary | 17 January 2019

Q. I note that (Dear Mary, 12 January) you advised your correspondent, resentful of Christmas expenditure, to offer instead ‘mutual experience gifts such as lunches and massages’. I am in my seventh decade and realised this year that, like most friends and family, I too have reached ‘peak stuff’. I propose that next year I

Drink

Happiness is a convivial bottle

January really is the cruellest month. No wonder some fortunate friends have dodged the column of dreary weather and short days, seeking asylum in the Southern Hemisphere, or at least the Southern Mediterranean. Not that the British winter climate is all bad. Brisk clear days promote mental rigour. Barry Smith, a historian from New Zealand

Mind your language

Colleagues

The parliamentary press gallery has in the past given a pair of silver shoe buckles to the Speaker as a token of respect, since his shoes were all they could see of him from their perch above his chair. They won’t be giving buckles to John Bercow, for he has done away with most of

The Wiki Man