I write this on Valentine’s Day, having run into the King of Greece early this morning in the local bank asking a teller where he could buy a Valentine card for his queen. (He received a blank stare for his trouble.) After 47 years of marriage, it’s nice to know that even kings bring Valentine
The phone rang. (My ring tone is the crowd in the Bobby Moore stand at West Ham singing ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles’.) I was lying on a mattress on the floor. Early morning sun was streaming in through tall windows. A cat, one of those skinny, sharply intelligent-looking ones, was vigorously grooming itself near my
The loud clanging of metal poles woke me rudely from my sleep. I opened my eyes suspiciously, accustomed as I am to disasters creeping up on me when I least expect them. I lay for a few moments contemplating the sounds and what they could mean. Builders shouting, vans pulling up and driving away, heavy
Truth is as strange as Dick Francis’s fiction. Newbury’s meeting on Saturday when, in a bizarre accident, two horses were electrocuted in the parade ring was a tragic and hideous experience. Those who heard the dying squeals of Andy Turnell’s Marching Song will never forget them. It was all the sadder because it should have
Since the coalition came to power, a consensus seems to have sprung up on the left that tax avoidance is wrong. Not tax evasion — which everyone agrees is wrong — but avoidance. A campaigning organisation called UK Uncut has sprung up that uses social media to organise sit-ins in high street branches of Top
Celebrations — not just an egregious though annoyingly addictive form of mini-confectionery, but the single hottest topic in sport. Celebrations — not just an egregious though annoyingly addictive form of mini-confectionery, but the single hottest topic in sport. This journal’s team of volunteers stationed along the touchlines of the nation’s football pitches report with sadness
How is it that, having said become instinct all their lives, people suddenly start to say go extinct? I use this as an example. I can understand the acquisition or disposal of a piece of slang, such as cool. It might have been possible for a young thing in the 1950s who looked on the
