New York I chose to live on 68th street between Madison and Fifth Avenue because it’s next to Central Park and is considered as convenient an address as any in the city. Not too far uptown and the DMZ — 92nd street; not too close to the shopping shrines down by the 50s. The house
On Sunday morning early I was trying to hitch a ride home. A big white Mercedes van came haring around the bend. I stuck out my thumb and it swerved violently and stopped beside me. ‘A good night, then, was it?’ said the driver as I collapsed into the passenger seat. A comedian. Young fella.
Having diagnosed myself with diabetes, I demanded the doctor run a full set of blood tests. Just to confirm what I already knew, you understand. I was weak, dizzy, my vision was blurred, I felt devastatingly tired, could barely get out of bed, and only then to stuff myself frenziedly with chocolate and biscuits. The
Colobus monkeys in the forest were throat singing like Tibetan monks. Mist rose from the Kericho tea gardens above us in the gloaming. My son Rider gazed longingly at the water. For a ten-year-old boy obsessed by fishing, patience is impossible. He yearns for that trout with every atom of his being. I was just
One of the sculptures at the British Museum’s splendid Pompeii exhibition shows four ferocious dogs attacking a stag as it awaits its bloody death with quiet resignation. It is a beautiful work of art, brilliantly carved from a single slab of marble, but potentially shocking today because it appears to rejoice at the prospect of
For several years now, I’ve been going to Cornwall for a week during the Easter Holidays — usually to Bude in North Cornwall. Bude has the advantage of being working class and unpretentious, so you’re unlikely to bump into any Guardian readers. My children and I can sit on the beach, tucking into our McDonald’s
David Beckham’s elegant but pointless cameo role for Paris Saint-Germain in their Champions League defeat to Barcelona the other day got plenty of play in the British press, despite his ineffectiveness. We love Becks — who doesn’t? — but he’s no longer the player he was, let alone the one he was hyped up to
Q. I live in Bombay and seem to attract a large number of house guests, notably friends’ daughters on their gap year. I am lucky in having an excellent maid and driver who go out of their way to take them around town, feed them up and do what they call ‘madam duty’, which is
The Ritz Hotel is a cake on Piccadilly made of stone; inside this cake, Lady Thatcher died. Some think it is tragic that she died here in the cake of stone; I do not. It has Italian men in tailcoats, a gifted pastry chef, and views of Green Park; she chose, I suspect, the ultimate
Ian Hislop mocked Stephen Mangan, when he put in a turn as the man asking the questions on Have I Got News For You last week, for saying ‘masination’ (for machination), but Hislop himself used the unjustified modern pronunciation ‘mashination’. The version with ‘mash-’ is not known for sure until 1961, although a book published
