Life

No life

Lloyd Evans

A beginner’s guide to getting a massage

 The agony could strike at any moment. Daggering pains in my lower back demanded correction. Not just painkillers, I needed a permanent cure. ‘Thai massage’ suggested the internet, so I hobbled across a tangle of east London streets and found a doorway beneath a pink neon sign. A receptionist of south Asian appearance, bundled in

Real life

A meeting with our new boy-racer neighbour

We were riding the two cobs down the lane when I heard the car roaring its engine behind us. I had seen it pull out of a long, winding driveway coming from a house perched on top of the highest point of the hillside, a few hundred yards along from our place. It went the

Wine Club

The perfect wines for a post-Christmas restock

Cooee, we’re back! Come on, wine lovers, it’s time to get cracking! Whether you’re clinging desperately to the water wagon like me or enjoying a liquor-fuelled January like Mrs Ray (she didn’t feel very well this morning, bless her), we have work to do refilling those bare wine racks that were plundered during the festivities.

No sacred cows

How to drink, according to Spectator readers

My column from a fortnight ago seeking advice about how to limit my alcohol intake has produced a huge response – and not just from readers. At a dinner last week to commemorate Paul Johnson, a famous historian told me how he manages to be so prolific while still enjoying several glasses every night. He

Dear Mary

Drink

I’m raising a glass to the Tory party’s future

Wine stimulates the wits, emboldens debate, and inspires the mind. Judicious quantities, abetted by judicious quality, encourage the participants to attack the important questions. Thus it has been over the past few days, discussing God and the Universe. I was talking to an astronomer, whose day is spent contemplating the vastness of interstellar space. Consider

Mind your language

The genteel roots of dunking

When I was a girl, it was bad manners to dunk a biscuit. Then I went abroad and found that Italian biscotti could scarcely be consumed in any other way. Back home, dunking a ginger nut seemed less criminal. Now I hear people using dunk and dump indifferently. Can this be right? After all, words

The Wiki Man

The lesson AI must learn from nature

What’s the difference between a café and a restaurant? It’s not as simple as it seems. Yes, the food at a restaurant will be fancier and more substantial. But there is a social distinction too: a restaurant places you under an obligation; a café does not. When you enter a café you order something out

The turf

In praise of trainer Dan Skelton

I’m not sure how the BBC would have taken it in my Nine O’Clock News days if after a tough interview I had embraced a disconsolate politician (though I can guess and it wouldn’t have been to the corporation’s credit). It was, though, the best moment in the ITV coverage of last Saturday’s racing, when