Dante’s Beach, Ravenna Was it chance or destiny, I wonder, that caused the eldest of our six children, Caterina, to pull over in the dead of night and park the car where she did? She was on her way back with a young man from a beach party down the coast and had stopped next
‘Where’s the eye hospital?’ shouted pretty much everyone standing outside a building signposted eye hospital in Irish. ‘An tAonad Oftailmeolaiochta’ read the sign on the brand new building and then in much smaller letters underneath ‘Opthalmology’, which is one of those English words that twists the tongue and isn’t much easier. Good for the Irish,
The Americans are weird about salad. I’m sorry, but somebody had to say it. Really, their use of the word ‘salad’ needs scare quotes around it. Where we generally mean ‘green leaves, and possibly a tomato if we’re feeling adventurous’, an American ‘salad’ can mean anything from pistachio cream with glacé cherries to tuna in
I hadn’t intended to go on a ‘staycation’ this summer. Quite the contrary, I’d booked a family holiday to Norway. Last August, I made the mistake of renting a villa in Majorca and it was so hot it was impossible to do anything, including sleep. So this year I insisted on going north and arranged
Time to come clean: I really like the Hundred. This is the sort of view that normally makes people look at you as if you had just professed an admiration for Gary Glitter. But come on, this is a crisp little short-form cricket tournament, played out at the height of summer to largely packed houses.
Q. We love having friends to stay at our house in Cornwall. One particular guest has the habit of arriving with the contents of her fridge, which she crams into mine. This can range from a two litre bottle of milk with enough left in it for a cup of tea, to a pot of half-eaten
There is a wonderful cognitive dissonance to Bistro Aix. It thinks it is in Paris but it is really in Crouch End, the flatter twin to Muswell Hill, a district so charismatic it had its own serial killer in Dennis Nilsen. (He killed more people in Willesden, but Willesden doesn’t receive its due: here or
My husband has ordered a copy of Craig Brown’s new book, out next week, a bit late for my birthday. I know he’ll grab it while I’m doing the washing up and later read out bits, which would be nice if he were any good at it. I wonder if the book explains the title:
To start with there was an odd word left like a fridge on a street corner, not where you’d expect, but easy enough to explain. Then we noticed whole sentences being wedged into strange places, a collection of beer cans glittering in an otherwise ordinary winter privet hedge. Flocks of scattered thoughts began to sweep
I wake for work and work for pay.The morning is not morning yet.My body is a rented lump of clay. The swollen clouds oppress the day.The cold pierces like a bayonet.I wake for work and work for pay convinced my inner life has gone astray.I gain a wage by pointless sweat.My body is a rented
A man walks the black soil of a reaped field. He pauses to kneel and parse the earth for old coins or unearthed aluminium. He is twenty-two. He is fifty-eight. He’s not a man but a child with a dog. He’s my boss. He’s a gamekeeper, he’s a bailiff at my door. Three buzzards form
Gary Lineker once summed up football as ‘a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.’ Ascot’s Dubai Duty Free Shergar Cup, a team contest in which four teams of three international jockeys, one of them restricted to female riders, compete for points on randomly
