Cannes It’s raining, the stars are hiding, the hacks and paparazzi are waterlogged and frustrated, and the shimmering images of the beautiful people walking up the red carpet are just that, images of glories long gone. The film festival used to be a glamorous affair when I was a young man. I remember the brouhaha
The weatherman had breezily predicted a fine, warm, spring day — and it was. We were on the road early, my grandson sitting beside me on his booster seat, keenly searching the unfolding scenery with his pellucid blue eyes for notable things to report. At three and a half years old his speech and understanding
Are you stressed? Do you worry that your stress levels are not normal? Do you fret that your reactions to everyday situations are an indicator of your total inability to cope with modern existence? Then why not take my handy personal stress self-assessment test? It’s easy, fun and at the end there will be an
My mother’s father, Sir Richard Paget Bt, was not just an old-fashioned Somerset landowner but also an amateur scientist, artist and musician of boundless energy and curiosity, whose achievements included the writing of a book on the origins of human speech, the invention of a sign language for the deaf, the hand-crafting of musical instruments,
I have a weakness for the versifier Ogden Nash and one of my favourites is his observation: Shake and shake the ketchup bottle First none will come and then a lot’ll. It has been a bit like that this past year with my punting. Last year’s Twelve to Follow for the Flat didn’t lose us
When are you truly middle-aged? ‘The years 20 to 40 are what you might call the fillet steak of life,’ said Philip Larkin. ‘The rest is very much poorer cuts.’ Some might dispute this and put the turning-point at 45, while others will maintain it’s all about how old you feel rather than your biological
Q. It is occasionally necessary for me to pretend to be asleep. What technique do actors use, when feigning death or sleep, to ensure their eyeballs are still and their eyelids do not flutter? — Name withheld, Hampshire A. To pre-empt fluttering, let the actual eyeballs look downwards behind the closed lids. Q. Your correspondent
Although I promise to move on to drink, forgive me for beginning with a less interesting but even more complex subject: government. It is easy to patronise the Italians. The Risorgimento was a failure (See David Gilmour’s superb The Pursuit of Italy). Since the days of Cavour’s Machiavellianism and Garibaldi’s Cav and Pag bravura, the
Was the Ancient Mariner a Conservative party member? Coleridge tells us several times that he had a ‘glittering eye’, an infallible sign of a screw loose somewhere. The S.T. Coleridge school of political psychiatry came into its own last weekend when the newspapers were told that Tory party ‘associations are all mad, swivel-eyed loons’. The
It came at last, the letting-go, Up over the hill and down our street — The end of time had, finally, been reached. There was comfort in it, the worst happening And it being of no consequence, since we were done for. What did it matter if our digital photo frames were lost, Our data-carrying
If I stand on the forecourt of Euston station tomorrow morning, I will be able to get to Manchester by high-speed train in 20 years, one hour and eight minutes. That’s only 19 years, 364 days and 23¾ hours longer than it took me last month. But at least we know that 17 June 2033,
