Life

High life

Breach of trust

New York While on the tennis circuit from the mid-Fifties to 1965, it was an open secret that there was a lot of hanky-panky going on in the women’s locker rooms. Mind you, lady players were much older than they are now, but there were still some pretty young and impressionable girls competing who took

Low life

Spectator sport

The first thing me and my boy do when we go to the car auction is to head for the burger van and order a cheeseburger each. The burger bar is called CJ’s. We jokingly call it CJD’s because we say the burgers consist of cartilage, udder and compacted sewage. Sometimes we pretend to identify

Slow life

Black Hawk down

My friend Spud had an Agusta 109. That’s the best type of helicopter. They’re like super-fancy flying Ferraris, shiny, and all Louis Vuitton and shagpile inside, the closest thing to a magic carpet that you can get. For Spud, the 109 was a skeleton key to everything, as well as a magic carpet to everywhere.

More from life

Speed limit | 27 October 2007

I will never agree with the video referee in England’s World Cup final, even if he produces a certificate signed by every member of the Royal College of Opticians. Though the South Africans deserved their victory, for me Mark Cueto’s effort will always be a try. But officials are not always wrong. The Newmarket stewards

Spectator Sport

Club before country

Widespread focus of national passions on the conclusion of Lewis Hamilton’s dash for the chequered flag on the Formula One racetrack and rugby’s compelling World Cup muted much of England’s hostile recriminations over its inept football team’s almost certain elimination from the 2008 European championship. The diversions, however, only delayed the deluge of derision, and

Dear Mary

Your problems solved | 27 October 2007

Q. This summer I spent a couple of nights in an hotel in France. The friend I had been staying with suddenly had rather a lot of people so I volunteered to go to the hotel — quite a good holiday trick if there are a lot of children about. Usually when I check into

Food

Restaurants | 27 October 2007

St Alban, 4–12 Regent Street, London SW1 St Alban is the latest restaurant from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, who have almost mythic status as restaurateurs, and rightly so. They are, after all, the team that at various times have been behind The Ivy, Le Caprice, J. Sheekey and The Wolseley but never Garfunkel’s, which

Mind your language

Mind your language | 27 October 2007

‘Let your little tike show off their little trike with this trendy shirt’, read an advertisement for toddlers’ T-shirts that Veronica showed me. In British English, tyke means ‘bitch, cur’ or ‘Yorkshireman’. In American English it is often used innocently enough for ‘child’. But it was the slogan on the advertised T-shirts that struck me: