Just before I left Gstaad for the Greek islands I went to dinner at Eugenie Radziwill’s, whose other guests included the great Barry Humphries and his wife Lizzie, and a couple I had never met before but whose name rang a distant bell, John Sutherland. The bell turned out not to be so distant, the
Golly my testicles are shrinking fast. At this rate by Christmas they’ll be down to the size of garden peas. And I might have breasts on the way, too, it says on page 92 of the hormone injection contraindications leaflet. Fantastic! Just what I’ve always wanted. After two days at the seaside at St Raphaël,
At last. I’ve waited a long time for this moment. I’ve been through years of torture at the hands of excitable twenty-somethings, experimental thirty-somethings and Booker-prize-winning forty-somethings. I’ve had nothing but adventurous, liberal-minded, free-spirited sorts living in the flat upstairs. But I don’t want happy, joyful and free people living near me. I don’t want
Laikipia The bull elephant had roamed our northern marches of the Laikipia plateau for decades. I always recognised him when he passed through the farm because his handsome 65-pound tusks had a distinctive curve and a thickness that showed his ivory might have grown much larger, had he lived. Instead, armed Pokot poachers ambushed
Character is destiny, according to Heraclitus, and that becomes increasingly clear as you get older and chart the ups and downs of your friends. Take the fate of one of my oldest acquaintances, who I’ll call ‘Philip’. Up until his mid-forties, Philip had a pretty spectacular career as a journalist and broadcaster. He won awards,
After a carefree month at my wife’s house in Tuscany — the longest summer holiday I have spent there for maybe 30 years — the return to England this week has proven especially irksome. It is depressing enough to land at any British airport, but Stansted takes the cake. Arriving there after a Ryanair flight
Were you still up, as they used to say about Portillo in the 1997 election, for Hedwall? It was well past midnight on Sunday, the sort of hour when all good Spectator readers should be tucked up in bed — or when the really good ones are thinking about heading home — that Caroline Hedwall,
Q. My boyfriend, an artist, is driving himself and others mad by his inability to keep track of his mobile. This he keeps putting down randomly on any old surface of his disorganised cottage, even though he knows there is signal only in certain places, so he can’t depend on locating it by hearing it
There was outrage last week when it was found that the Oxford English Dictionary had listed one sense of literally as ‘virtually, as good as’ — in other words, the reverse of its established meaning. Pedants were literally up in arms (in the new sense). The funniest thing was that the offending entry in the
My lifelong friend, dear heart, these days you’re losing the plot: you’re a fish in a bucket, open-mouthed, flopping about in a panic, bereft of your sheen, all confidence gone. Examined in action on a black and white screen, every movement recorded, you’re haplessly tethered, chaotically jumping, locked into a pulse of your own. Tracked
