Life

High life

High life | 23 August 2018

This was a real surprise, and on my birthday (11 August) to boot: a grown man, whose parents I used to know and like, wrote in the sophisticated pages of The Spectator (‘Desperate Housewives’) that what women really want is a man with a big house. Golly, you don’t say, for God’s sake stop the

Low life

Low life | 23 August 2018

The Villa Carnignac art gallery is located on a Mediterranean island off the French Riviera called Porquerolles. Purpose-built to show off billionaire hedge-fund executive Edouard Carnignac’s modern art collection, the gallery opened in June. Monsieur Carnignac hung out at the Factory with Andy Warhol in the 1960s, is a freedom-loving, polo-playing child of the counter-culture

Real life

Real life | 23 August 2018

After I had been glossing the woodwork for a few days, I started to feel light-headed. It hadn’t occurred to me that the paint was solvent-based, of course. Not until I caught sight of the writing on the tin one evening while painting a bedroom doorframe did it make sense. But it was too late,

Wild life

Wild life | 23 August 2018

Laikipia ‘This year we’re too broke to take our cattle to the show,’ I told Mark. For six months we had been preparing the show string, training our Borans to stand correctly, to walk well, squandering money on feed, brass nose rings and fancy halter ropes. As the big day loomed I looked at the

Wine Club

Is it a crime to say ‘women don’t have penises’?

Is it now a crime to say “women don’t have penises”? A police force and a City mayor seem to think it might be. They are promising to investigate women who say so. That question arises because some women are putting up stickers in public places bearing those words. Some of those stickers are pink

Trump’s presidency has imploded – in less than two years

This is the beginning of the end of the Donald Trump presidency. The double whammy of Michael Cohen, his former fixer, pleading guilty on eight counts, including illegal hush money payments, or, to put it more precisely, campaign contributions, to two women at Trump’s personal direction for ‘the purpose of influencing the election,’ coupled with

No sacred cows

Jerk rice – with a side serving of insanity

Earlier this week, the Labour MP Dawn Butler ‘called out’ Jamie Oliver for ‘appropriation’. His sin, according to the shadow minister for women and equalities, was to launch a product called Punchy Jerk Rice. ‘I’m just wondering do you know what #Jamaican #jerk actually is?’ she asked him on Twitter. ‘It’s not just a word

Spectator Sport

The baby who could transform English cricket

Alice Cook’s impending third child could turn out to be the perfect delivery for England. Already the expectant father Alastair has asked for a few days off work, thus possibly sparing the England selectors a synapse-crunching headache. At some point before the end of days the problem of what to do with ‘Chef’ has to

Dear Mary

Dear Mary | 23 August 2018

Q. I live in a houseshare with two other people; one of whom I am very fond of and the other, not so much. She lies and cheats and is a terrible friend. She is a social climber extraordinaire who has abandoned her real friends. My other housemate is of the same opinion. The lease

Food

Back to the Eighties

I wouldn’t normally visit Coq d’Argent, which I think means the chicken of money. It is a moderately famous restaurant in a pink and brown tower in the City of London, once owned, as so much has been, by Sir Terence Conran, and now by D&D, specialists in soulless food barns. As restaurants go, it

Mind your language

Relish the opportunity

The Sun gave a sad picture of British loneliness recently in a report about the national yearning to play a board game like Monopoly, which could only be fulfilled about five times a year when someone could be found to play it with. In passing, the paper remarked: ‘Two-thirds of Brits would also relish the