“The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom,” espoused German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Having spent the past two weeks in the grip of both, after fracturing my femur so disastrously it necessitated a total hip replacement, I can confirm he’s correct. And given I did it tripping in a hotel restaurant, I would
I have been dithering for years about when to stop judging The Great British Baking Show. When I joined nine years ago, I thought, since I was in my mid-seventies, that I’d be lucky to manage two years. At that age, my mother was deaf as a post and away with the fairies, believing her
I reached New York for the premiere of the fourth series of Industry in a mild state of delirium. I was traveling from Lamu, and it had taken four flights and 20 hours in the air to reach the US. Lamu is so beautiful that it briefly makes you consider whether to bother with western
The files arrived marked ‘STRICT EMBARGO’ and ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ and ‘FORTH BRIDGE REVISED’ and stamped with various crests and insignia. My dog Mot was intrigued and sniffed the stack warily. I have a few days to ingest this mass of information — ceremonial detail, armed forces involvement, order of service, processional arrangements, musical selections, historical precedent,
Surely there is a bit of humbug in this outrage about the two remaining jihadi Beatles, Kotey and Elsheikh, and Sajid Javid’s difficult but correct decision to send them for trial in America. Suppose the grisly pair had been located a couple of years ago in Raqqa. And let’s suppose there was a Reaper drone
By 74 it is easy to feel that you have seen it all, done it all, that nothing much surprises you any more. Striving gives way to coping. Drop a pencil and it rolls under the sofa. What you have to do is think about the best way to find it and pick it up.
How many novels do I have to write before reviewers stop saying ‘surprisingly good for a cook’? A friend says tartly that it’s a bit rich to complain — I could have been judged on my merits by writing under a pseudonym, only then I might not have been published at all. Another disheartening discovery
By now they must have finished sifting the 79 applications and be drawing up the actual shortlist for the chairmanship of the BBC. Nothing as remotely exciting has ever happened in that strange Trafalgar Square annexe of government, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It is, of course, an absurd ministry, originally invented, if
I see that the papers have finally given a name — ‘chavs’ — to the new working class. They are the type of people I have been drawing for years: trailer trash covered in bling bling, wearing Burberry baseball hats, white tracksuit bottoms and white trainers. They couldn’t be more different from the docile ‘pint-of-mild-please’
An eagerly anticipated lunch-date with our sainted proprietor’s wife. A la page as always, Barbara wanted to try the restaurant above Mourad Mazouz’s blindingly chic nightclub Sketch in Conduit Street. The Lecture Room notoriously costs about a million a mouthful, but they have dreamed up some wonderful and weird ways of making you feel it’s
I spent Tuesday evening watching Ashley, a 15-year-old blonde girl from Oklahoma, flirt with a British boy called PJ. ‘Wanna see some photos of me?’ asked Ashley. PJ grinned. ‘I think you’ll like them, they’re hot,’ said Ashley, and winked. A boy called Ghetto, whom neither of them had met before, interrupted the conversation. ‘Hello,
In the electronic age, a social disease is a virus you get from your email correspondents. And often from one-night stands. Three such co-respondents sent me word that as an entry in their ‘address book’ my computer now had some awful disease. Complicated instructions to erase followed. When questioned, not one of the owners of