Vanity thy name is Nikki Bedi. I’ve just been for one of my biannual visits to my ‘derm’ Dr Nick Lowe. The Times recently called him Dr Botox. I’ve been his patient for 13 years; the first seven in Santa Monica, where my skin had begun to resemble a chamois leather. Years of sun worship
Monday Dear me! Why does everyone take what we say so literally? When Dave declared that he wanted to end Punch and Judy Politics he was speaking metaphorically. He didn’t mean he was literally going to stop shouting abuse at Gordon. That would be silly. We need to hold the government to account. The British
It’s Powell week. I am due to speak at the site of his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech on Sunday, a rather clever idea dreamed up by my colleagues at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Kamal Ahmed and Patrick Diamond. I must admit I had initial reservations about the proposal. After all, I am
Monday What on earth is wrong with the general public at the moment? Why, according to the so-called opinion polls, do more people like Alistair Darling than Gids? Have they gone mad? Gids is clever, dynamic and handsome, whereas Darling, as Daddy so rightly pointed out at breakfast this morning, looks like a bemused old
Monday Big panic. Some of our candidates in marginal seats have been ringing up asking why they can’t find any nice piccies of Dave standing next to a flag which they can use in their leaflets for St George’s Day. Jed says we’re to tell everyone that there are such pictures, they’ve just gone missing.
Monday Major pasta panic! Dispatched to Oxfordshire to help Sam find lasagne sheets for Dave’s Thinkers and Opinionators Supper this weekend which is in real danger of being cancelled for the first time in its history — due to food shortages! Isn’t this just the most damning indictment of Brown’s Britain? Emailed Jed a memo:
My dinner parties are an exercise in patience. People used to tell me how much money they’d made buying in Islington when they did. ‘Good for you,’ I’d say, hating them just a little. I’ve noticed that recently my friends have stopped telling me how much equity they’d managed to suck out and try to
Over the last 20 years, gentlemen’s clubs have had to pay at least a token deference to modernity — equal rights, health and safety, inclusiveness. And then there is St Moritz Tobogganing Club, a British club with its own rules. Located in the middle of the Swiss Alps, it makes one uncomplicated demand of its
Daphne Guinness on awards shows and the US elections California is not the worst place in which to be stuck. In fact I love it! To view your world from a distance is interesting, hearing news slightly delayed, the anchors of life breaking until it is inevitable that your inner compass makes a paradigm shift. At
Mumbai A city where the children dash from car to car selling novels is the perfect place for a literary festival: on the way from the airport, snaking past shantytowns and catching my first glimpse of the Arabian Sea, I am offered The Kite Runner by street urchins knocking on the window of my taxi.
Oh dear. We lost the war of Obama buzzwords at the weekend. Now there’s an inquest to find out how Gordon managed to get compared to Barack before Dave. Monday Oh dear. We lost the war of Obama buzzwords at the weekend. Now there’s an inquest to find out how Gordon managed to get compared
We woke up early on Oscar morning to see the hills of Hollywood wreathed in fog, clouds and spitting rain. I shivered in the unseasonable freezing weather. ‘Should be fun on the red carpet this afternoon,’ I said to Percy. Turning on E! channel at 10 a.m. we watched presenters and starlets in strapless gown
Monday Thank goodness I keep a diary. I want to put on record here so that future generations of Lightwaters can see that it was my idea to have Our Leader encounter a great white ‘shark’ while surfing in South Africa! Moreover I picked out the blue, Malibu-cut Vilebrequins Dave was wearing while fleeing the
Carla Powell on the joys of the internet and the politics of Italy I am a late convert to the internet, but it has changed my life. I can sit here in my little farm in the Roman countryside and cultivate my olives — or, to be truthful, watch Dario the farm manager cultivate my olives
This week I have been prey to a prolonged bout of insomnia induced, I suspect, by the fact that I stay up to watch the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News followed by Newsnight and, invariably, one or the other contains an item which so disturbs me that my brain continues churning into the small hours. Despair
Monday Do I have to do everything around here? Silly Suzie from Dave’s office is too frightened to ask Lord A to move a load of packing boxes he’s left outside his office so she’s ordered me to do it. I’m to tell him he can’t leave them in the corridor any longer as everyone
David Tang reflects on the storms in China, and on being ‘Googled’ My daughter telephoned to say, to my disbelief, that she was snowbound in Hangzhou, where it never snows. The city is regarded as the most beautiful in China, with swaying willows surrounding an old lagoon on the edge of which Mao Tse-tung loved staying.
As publication of my new novel, My Favourite Wife, draws closer, Fred Kindall steps up the training. You need to be a fit man to publish a novel these days. ‘It’s good to be alive,’ Fred exults, as I lie on the floor of his gym and he bounces a black medicine ball on my
It’s said that vampires suffer from a syndrome called arithmomania or an obsessive love of counting, so much so that to escape a vampire you just need to throw loads of cloves of garlic on the floor and the vampire can’t resist counting them, allowing you to make a hasty exit. It was this obsession
In the month of back to basics, I no longer hanker for parties or cut-price cashmere, just the long, deep bath of my dreams. We spent New Year with friends in Cameron country: lovely Oxfordshire farmhouses, big fires and buttock-honing walks. My husband emerged glowing from his bath and said very sweetly that he would