Gstaad Blah, blah, blah! I’ve heard it all before. We are all swivel-eyed fanatics, racists and right-wing extremists. And we’re also bigots because we believe in Jesus Christ. Today is my name day, the Day of the Assumption, but please don’t ask me how my parents got Taki out of it — Panagia, Panagiotaki, Taki
I open my eyes. I’m on my back looking up at the neat joinery of a wooden roof. Resting between two of the cross trees is a row of handmade longbows. Green daylight filters through bushes and trees outside the window. I’m half in and half out of a sleeping bag on the floor of
I always suspected that I liked bread a bit too much, but ensconced inside a gated villa with only the finest, gluten-free food in the fridge and the dangerous nature of my dependency is writ large. ‘This is how teenage looters must feel about Nike,’ I ponder, as I imagine all kinds of scenarios in
I could not understand on Saturday why a fairly standard Newbury card had brought so many vehicles on to the approach roads. All was explained when I saw a group of merry ladies pulling knickers out of their handbags and comparing them. The old Welsh belter Tom Jones was appearing on stage after the day’s
As I write this, my face and hands are covered in scabs. I’d love to say I sustained these injuries while trying to save the Oxfam shop on Ealing Green from looters. (It was looted, by the way.) But the truth is I fell off my bike on the way to lunch with another journalist.
If, as seems universally accepted, eggs is indeed eggs, then the only other certainty in an increasingly troubled world is that Alastair Cook will eviscerate every English batting record, apart possibly from the highest individual score. His technique, concentration and stamina are monumental; his ability to eliminate risk is awesome. Even Stuart Broad said he
Q. I recently attended a house-cooling party. There were haybales around bonfires, barbecues and dancing to iPods with speakers. The house was open — although most of the furniture had gone — and we were invited to bring our own bedding if we wanted to sleep over. My 16-year-old daughter and I had a plane
The Savoy Grill is a famous restaurant in a famous hotel and it knows it. Although it is managed by Gordon Ramsay, with his TV horns and tabloid nightmares, it is still reeling with self-importance, an elderly debutante who once jumped on John Wayne in the loo. The view is of a taxi rank and
‘He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city,’ Sherlock Holmes said of Moriarty. ‘He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson.’ Holmes did not say: ‘He is the Napoleon of criminality.’ Nor did T.S. Eliot of Macavity, who was accorded the same sobriquet as
