A Greek football team has been warned it will be kicked off the field if its players wear uniforms advertising its two new sponsors. The shirts have been bright pink since the team was founded, and bear the names of local brothels ‘Villa Erotica’ and ‘Soula’s House of History’. The hypocrisy involved is mind-boggling. Football
Brazil! What fantasies, mainly erotic, are conjured up by that word! At Salvador airport, as promised, leaning over the rail bearing a sign with my name on it, was a man sent to drive me to the hotel. I gave him a nod (I was too tired to smile) and without further ado he led
Any half decent guide to the countryside should include the following tip: if you find an owl by the side of the road, don’t pick it up. I was riding along the lane on the skewbald pony when I suddenly realised there were two huge eyes staring up at me. It was a beautiful brown
One of the ways by which I pay for the maintenance of my two Inigo Jones pavilions at Stoke Park in Northamptonshire is to let one of them out for wedding receptions. These buildings, originally a chapel and a library, were once attached by colonnades to a large country house; but this burnt down in
After Brad Wiggins’s Tour de France victory, Mo Farah’s Olympics successes and Andy Murray’s first Grand Slam title, any other result would have been unthinkable, so praise the Lord that Frankel did win Ascot’s Champion Stakes. On unsuitably soft ground and after gifting the others lengths at the start, the unbeaten star of world racing
At a lunch party last Sunday with a group of journalists, the conversation inevitably turned to class and how this ancient English obsession has come to dominate the political news agenda. It’s now such a hot topic that the moment a member of the government does anything that can be construed as remotely snobbish —
Q. I work in a large open-plan office and one of my neighbours is driving me to distraction. She has a number of peculiar habits, but the real source of my ire is that she wears at least eight gold bangles on her right arm which jangle loudly every time she moves. Other people around
A miserable day: grey, grizzling, drizzly — October going on February. Our host had reluctantly given up the crazy idea of lunch in the garden; the first guests helped him move the tables and chairs inside. It may have been an attempt to warm ourselves against winter, but the talk turned to Italy, further stimulated
‘Look at all this bumf,’ said my husband, shaking some ‘guidance’ on how to fill in his tax return and sounding like someone out of Much Binding in the Marsh. I mentioned last week the New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, in its several Tribes, of Gypsies, Beggers, Thieves,
At her school interview, my daughter was asked to name the most important technology of the modern age. I’m proud to say she answered ‘sewerage’. Some historians now claim the washing machine was, in economic terms, a far more revolutionary innovation than the internet or the mobile phone: it was this which enabled women to
