It was a few months ago. I was coming back from my morning walk with Greta in Battersea Park, so it can only have been half past ten in the morning. A familiar neighbourhood figure zigzagged recklessly across the road towards us. He had something like a sense of purpose about him. Telling a stranger
‘My name is Love,’ typed the help assistant, ‘and I’m a member of the Airbnb community support team.’ I was using one of those chat boxes, where someone from the company you’re grappling with, embodied in a flashing cursor, interacts with you in print on a live chat screen. I am kind and polite, I
There’s nothing more intriguing than a closely guarded secret recipe. Coca-Cola and KFC are two famous examples, with the precise ingredients for the soda syrup and special coating kept in guarded vaults: the story is that those who hold the information aren’t allowed to travel on the same plane in case of disaster. Lea &
It’s the end of an era at Yapp Bros, long-time partners in the Spectator Wine Club, and many a wine-lover’s favourite independent merchant. My old mucker, the vinous truffle-hound that is Jason Yapp, is stepping down in December after 32 years with the company, having served variously as sales director, wine director and MD. Yapps
I almost choked on my cornflakes when I read that the Prime Minister had said he would slash red tape and ‘rip out the bureaucracy that blocks investment’ as part of a bid to persuade global business executives to invest in UK plc. Is this the same Keir Starmer whose government has just published an
Sailing’s very own ubermensch Sir Ben Ainslie has every right to be considered the world’s most competitive bloke. Those who knew him as a teenager say he always had just two ambitions: to bag a sackful of Olympic medals, and to win the America’s Cup for Britain. Well he didn’t have much trouble becoming the
Q. We want to keep on good terms with a potential grandson-in-law but he does not have the right kit. This doesn’t always matter these days, but it mattered when we took him and our granddaughter to our local racecourse. He came in a suit which he boasted he had not worn since school. He
Sally Lunn’s is a teashop in Bath. It sits in a lane by the abbey, and the Roman baths. Paganism and Christianity jostle here: Minerva battles Christ, who wins, for now. Sally Lunn’s calls itself ‘the oldest house in Bath’ (c. 1482). It is rough-hewn, with a vast teal window and pumpkins on display. The pumpkins
Virginia Woolf submitted an article to Tit-Bits at the age of eight. It was rejected. The experience might have hurt her. With her sister Vanessa and brother Thoby she had built an imaginary world in their family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, modelled upon Tit-Bits. Writing as an adult about George Eliot she said: ‘She
He keeps the why his black crows fly, the where his dark nights go, the how he’ll play with stooks of hay the impresario, up threadbare sleeves with twigs, dry leaves, ragwort that on warm days seeds potholed tar cats’ eyes ill-star for winter’s matinées. Flat cap cock-eyed, stick arms flung wide, bowed to the
Good morning. Perhaps before I am old, wandering on the face of the world, lost, you could suggest an open place of grass and curious trees where I walk barefoot as the day cools under a massive sky, with a herd of something I can’t quite see moving slowly over there on my right, the
Somebody up there doesn’t like me much at the moment. The bank insists that two cash machines which failed to deliver me £400 actually did and is charging me accordingly; Mrs Oakley’s entire cooking range has to be expensively renewed because no one will replace a cracked induction hob; and when our sewage pipe blocked the
