New York At a chic dinner party for some very beautiful women, your correspondent shocked the attendees by quoting an even greater writer than the greatest Greek writer since Homer – Rod Liddle – and his definition of why royalty matters: because it is ‘anachronistic and undemocratic’. Hear, Hear! A particularly attractive guest, Alissa –
The lady standing on the doorstep did not need to tell me what she thought of my house, because the look on her face said it all. I was still fussing over the minor details of how the place looked while the builder boyfriend waited for me in the car, engine running, because we get
I’m trying to organise an event in Westminster with the journalist Isabel Oakeshott and it’s proving a bit of a nightmare. So many obstacles have been thrown in our way that we’re beginning to think it might be jinxed. But we aren’t about to give up. The original idea was for the two of us
Q. I was lucky enough to marry into a family where everyone gets on well. One of my brothers-in-law was the only one with a big enough wall in his house to hang a family treasure of a fragile antique tapestry, but last year he too moved into a smaller house and the tapestry now
I am assured that this is not a legend. But a few years ago, an Irishman’s life was twice saved by a raging bull. The Irish fellow was running with the bulls at a town near Pamplona. He tripped and was virtually impaled. The bull’s horn went into one side of the chap’s stomach and
‘So, are the Tories going to win the election?’ asked my husband after listening to the engaging psephologist Sir John Curtice. I’d been paying attention, but was distracted by Sir John’s phrase ‘the rub in the ointment’. Typical of extempore speech, this a metaphorical mixture of the fly in the ointment and the rub. Ointment might
i.m. Abdul Gaffar Choudhury Above us, sparrows are acrobats in dripping banana trees. A downpour hisses out of the white, suffocated sky. People lined the streets when your body passed in its refrigerated van. Your image still hangs at the gates. Water is falling, falling blindly, pooling along your grave. A stray dog drinks its fill. Thunder stamps the air in
words like acrimony and amertumebefore somebody came along trying to cram the hard graininess of disagreement into languagebefore all that, there were birds some really quite big ones—a rude person might say elephantine which would be harsh because the thing is they still flew, that’s the miracle of it —however wide of girth and unwieldy they were with their big,
The butterfly, rolled in the blind,A shape of grey against the gold,Becomes its shape again, unrolled,Still as a photograph, definedBy sun that shadows it, behind. Leaves of the roses, too, are castUpon this theatre of light,Stirring like wings prepared for flightBut, like the butterfly, caught fastThis bush, this blind — nothing will last. Not even
Our local Sainsbury’s, though admirable in every other way, has a slightly inflated estimate of the disabled population of Seven-oaks, with all the plum parking spaces near the entrance reserved for blue badge holders. Every time I drive in, a voice from my inner bastard says: ‘Jeez, if it weren’t for all these bloody disabled
Usually in May I am still casting an enviously nostalgic eye backwards to Aintree and Cheltenham, reluctant yet to pack away my stouter shoes and rainproof Barbour. This year it is different: I have rarely looked forward more to the Flat. It all began with two glorious races for the Guineas. Rock-star wrinklies make farewell
