The light does such magical things on this hillside that, as I walk the steep narrow lanes between fields, I can’t take my eyes off a distant, golden-topped mountain range. At night the sky is so clear I wander into the garden and stare at the northern star, bright and low. I saw in the
Laikipia, Kenya Twenty years ago, we pitched a tent in the wilderness which became the farm where we live now. We were starting from scratch. At twilight we saw a low, silver mist descend into the trees, making halos around the distant giraffe and elephant, and settling into the grass. The constellations came out, the
The park we go to every day is Victorian – large, full of mock landscapes and extravagantly diverse settings, lakes, woodlands, formal gardens and tiny wildernesses. We went on a guided tour of Buckingham Palace’s gardens three years ago, and afterwards my husband said: ‘Well, it was very nice. But Battersea Park is nicer.’ Above
For almost a decade, doughnuts ruled my life. When I first began baking professionally, I fell into doughnut-making. It was entirely my own fault: after graduating from culinary school, I decided the best thing I could do to improve my pastry skills was to bake regularly. So I knocked together a product and price list
It has been a gloriously wine-soaked year for us lushes at the Spectator Wine Club, during which we have worked closely with our chums at Private Cellar, the leading independent merchant based on the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens. PC’s marketing director, Laura Taylor, was not only headteacher at this year’s Spectator Wine School, she
According to a friend who sold a successful consulting business a few years ago, the problem with employing middle-class Britons, unlike Americans, is that there’s a summit to their ambitions. Once they’ve earned enough money to trade in their BMW for a Porsche, install a new kitchen and create an attic room with a dormer
Anyone know the Hindi for schadenfreude? Who could have seen that coming: certainly not your correspondent, who had invested some time ago in India to win the Cricket World Cup. Not to be, sadly, and the red-hot favourites were given an absolute pasting in their own backyard by a team of unfancied Aussies who had
Q. I have given in to pressure from a talented godson and agreed to introduce him to a successful businessman whom my godson thinks he could work with. Knowing them both well, I believe he is right. I have arranged a dinner party at my house but we are going to be four men and
I am lazy and nosy, and so I spend a lot of time on the GWR service from Penzance to London Paddington. Each journey is a play with a unique atmosphere. Some are seething, particularly in summer when an eight-carriage train cannot fit everyone who wants to swim in the ocean but dine in west
‘She’ll be telling us next how lovely the word petrichor is,’ replied my husband. I had told him that the redoubtable word-collector Susie Dent had said: ‘Probably my favourite winter-word of all, apricity, is the warmth of the sun on a chilly day.’ She has been saying this every winter for years, and why not?
Open the front door into waterBrown water with no heart in itOne side of the street to the other – Small shops drowned in itOur car drowned in itThe sun gleamed down on it like a joke Unseasonal, climate change thingAt an upstairs window an old womanStaring down like a question Water in the hall,
