I received my Christmas present earlier than usual. It was a message sent via The Spectator from a gentleman who had been a reader since — hold on to your hats — 1947, when he was 18 years of age. He is now 90 and believed me to be 88. I thanked him and said
In the Rwandan Genocide Memorial gift shop I bought a handy Kinyarwanda–Kiswahili–English phrase book. The tipping point in the decision to buy it were the phrases ‘This gentleman will pay for everything’, ‘Would you like to dance?’ and ‘What do you call this?’ Our Genocide Memorial museum tour was the sobering prelude to a cycling
The bonfire burned and burned, choking out black smoke, and when my headache got so bad I could barely see straight, I decided I would have to look into it. I say this at every year’s end: I am so tired of fighting. I sometimes wish I could lose this supernatural gift I have for
Laikipia After a year of peace and plentiful rain, my farm in Kenya is fantastic. Peace, rain — leave a farmer alone and he can just get on with growing food for Africa. So my thoughts are with my fellow farmers Gary and Jo Hensman, both in their seventies, who last month were chased
Storm clouds may be rumbling over racing’s future financing in terms of gambling legislation but 2019 offered no shortage of happy memories. The emergence of the once-bumptious Oisin Murphy as a modest, articulate and thoughtful champion jockey. The pulsating battle between two previous winners in this year’s King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes when
I write this from Camp Bah Humbug, whither I’ve been banished by my ever-loving. I had merely suggested that it might be time to dispense with a Christmas tree this year and that was it. Off I was sent to the gulag and told that if can’t say anything nice I’m not to say anything
Ever since I was a child, I’ve associated Christmas with my mentally disabled brother Chris. Technically, he’s my half-brother — I have four half-siblings and a whole one — but to refer to him that way feels a bit mean-spirited, as if I’m trying to put some distance between us. Is ‘mentally disabled’ the right
We don’t half take a lot for granted. We may look up to the Aussies, kowtow to the Americans and look on in awe at the Chinese, but we’re not doing too badly ourselves. To judge from the papers, we’re a nation of fatties who when not pigging out on Pringles on the sofa are
From Dame Joan Collins Q. Invariably, when I escape to the ladies’ room or powder room or restroom (whatever the current politically correct term for this place is), I am asked for a ‘selfie’, and the request usually comes while I’m washing my hands or powdering my nose. What is the correct way to handle
Simpson’s in the Strand stopped serving breakfast in 2017, after it had been renovated to stop it smelling of cabbage. Fat men wept, but worse things have happened here. Simpson’s is built on the site of John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace, in which Geoffrey Chaucer, Gaunt’s brother-in-law, wrote part of The Canterbury Tales. The palace
Christmas: without being grand and Proustian, this is a season when time present inevitably takes one back to time past. When we are very young, despite the grown-ups’ best efforts to promote moral uplift, Christmas means presents. I remember being given King Solomon’s Mines when I was nine or ten. No book has ever thrilled
‘Come off it,’ said my husband when I told him that upcycling was the word of the year. His response did not chime with the spirit of the Cambridge Dictionary in naming it: ‘We think that our fans resonated with upcycling not as a word in itself but with the positive idea behind it.’ I
There is a famous chart which shows the time it took for various technologies to be adopted by 50 million people. From its introduction, the telephone took 75 years to reach 50 million users. For radio, it was 38; for television, 13; for the world wide web, merely four. Online services are faster still. Facebook
