I’ve got end-of-season blues. I know I say this every year, but this has been a particularly fun winter, with friends throwing goodbye parties, dinners and lunches since the beginning of March. My liver has done a Gaddafi and taken a brutal revenge on my body, and the right ankle is doing a Saif as
Beside the roundabout a woman was standing with her thumb out. Late thirties. Black knee-length boots. Old jeans. No coat. The thumb was resigned, indifferent. I swung in sharply, positioning the door handle precisely level with the thumb. She pulled the door open and sat in. A red, careworn face. I stated my destination. She
After saying the word ten times I realised I was fighting a losing battle. I was sitting in the back of a taxi at Cardiff station and I could not get the driver to understand where I wanted to go to. This was distressing because, so far as my family has been able to make
For critics of state education, locked in combat with the teaching unions, it is easy to overlook the fact that some comprehensives do an outstanding job. One example in my neck of the woods is Cardinal Vaughan, a Roman Catholic boys’ school. Last year, 90 per cent of its pupils got five good GCSEs, making
The most colourful sight at Sandown on the Saturday before the Cheltenham Festival was not the jockeys’ silks but the vivid bruising around Ruby Walsh’s eye as he returned on his first winner since breaking his leg in November. The blues, reds and yellows visible on his stitched-up face were the result of a fall
There was an advert recently on Italian TV when four vast but genial blokes filled the screen extolling the virtues of an unspecified product, before the camera pulled back to reveal they were all Italian rugby forwards and squeezed shoulder to shoulder inside a minute Fiat. The ad was pleasing for a number of reasons,
Q. My daughter’s bedroom window has a clear view down into next door’s kitchen. Yesterday she drew my attention to several mice who were bolting out of the kitchen skirting, feasting on crumbs and having a high old time while my neighbour (who is very nice but not a bosom pal) was safely upstairs putting
I asked Veronica how to pronounce LOL. She is of an age to know, for this abbreviation is ubiquitous in emails and texts. ‘El-o-el,’ she said. So, orally it isn’t much of an abbreviation, though it performs better than www, which replaces three syllables, world wide web, with nine syllables. Next week LOL joins other
