Australians have a reputation for rugged individualism, grit and competence. But when it comes to the pandemic, we have seen another side to my country: insecure, anxious and frozen by the fear of death from Covid. A recent global poll found that Australians more worried about the virus than any other western country. They have
The Taliban do not yet control all of Afghanistan. As most of the country fell to the Islamic militant group with terrifying speed, Panjshir valley, about 100 miles north of Kabul, leading deep into the Hindu Kush mountains, remained unconquered. It is now the last province beyond the Taliban’s control. While many Afghan politicians have
The employee alleged that she was forced to drink heavily at a banquet during a business trip and was then sexually assaulted by her boss. She informed her managers, but they failed to act and told her to keep quiet. So she staged a protest in the company canteen and shared details of her ordeal
It was halfway through lunch that something reminded my friend Marcus about Ray Charles and his plane. ‘Did you know he used to fly it himself?’ he asked the rest of us. ‘When it reached cruising altitude he’d insist on taking the controls. Obviously his passengers were terrified. They thought a blind man playing chess
Jerusalem I thought I’d found the most efficient small clinic in Jerusalem, a quarter of an hour’s drive from my home. For months, I’ve been going there for testing, with no fuss or waiting time. At the end of last week, the government authorised the third ‘booster’ dose of Covid vaccine for over-forties. I made
With a laboratory leak in Wuhan looking more and more likely as the source of the pandemic, the Chinese authorities are not the only ones dismayed. Western environmentalists had been hoping to turn the pandemic into a fable about humankind’s brutal rape of Gaia. Even if ‘wet’ wildlife markets and smuggled pangolins were exonerated in
One morning in 1966, I woke up seeing double. I splashed cold water over my face and blinked a few times but I still saw double. I had had glandular fever the previous month, for which there was no treatment except rest and paracetamol, and the GP said in time it would cure itself —
In early March last year, I was self-isolating in my flat in London. Even though there were only a few hundred confirmed cases of Covid a day, I had met someone the week before who had tested positive. This was before anyone knew much about the virus, but people were worried by the news coming
A couple of Southern Hemisphere summers ago, in January 2019, I was at the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington, New Zealand. It was an unseasonably chilly evening as I sat listening to an emotional solo piano performance by Nick Cave. He sang a rendition of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Avalanche’, a wonderfully gloomy piece of psychology set
The bravest woman I ever met was a schoolteacher in Afghanistan. She was a tiny figure in a black abaya and headscarf, but during the dark days of Taliban rule she had turned her home into a secret classroom for women and girls. Every lesson there was a victory against the odds. It was very
I spend a lot of my life worrying about the climate. When you have more than 100 miles of precious chalk streams under your care, rain becomes the currency of your life. Too much in summer. Too little in winter. Or sometimes the other way around. Other times a bit of both. For us river
‘Londoners searching for more space during Covid are buying up English country manors,’ said a Wall Street Journal headline in January — and that was certainly the trend reported by eager out-of-town estate agents. The middle classes,spurred by a temporary stamp-duty cut, were deserting the city in search of green pastures, home offices and the
In January my 80-year-old grandmother had a large birthday party in her home city of Nanjing. For the British branch of her family, stuck in lockdown, it was surreal to see photos and videos of what can only be described as a banquet. A hundred people hugging, drinking, laughing — it was as if Covid
The other week, when I was shopping in Margate, I saw a number of posters from Boots urging support for its campaign against ‘hygiene poverty’. Barely aware of the term, I looked it up online and was soon presented by claims that much of Britain is gripped by a crisis of personal neglect because of
Many years ago, before the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988, I was based in Peshawar in Pakistan, near Afghanistan. I was responsible for British diplomatic reporting on the war and engaging with Afghan leaders. I came to know the Taliban. They were, to put it mildly, not particularly nice guys: intensely parochial, geographically and
Are we seeing a new kind of Taliban? The men who seized Kabul with such ease last weekend are doing their best to sound more moderate. Women, they say, should be allowed to work and have an education. They have offered amnesty to officials of the now-deposed Afghan government, something the old Taliban never dreamed
Montpellier Three weeks ago, 100,000 demonstrators turned out on the streets of France to protest President Emmanuel Macron’s hastily passed law to require vaccination passports to get on a train, eat at a restaurant or visit a shopping centre. A week later, the number had more than doubled. Last Saturday, it doubled again. One police
The dotcom bubble. The financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. The oil price spiral of the 1970s. The launch of the single currency. It would be fun, in a nerdish kind of a way, to debate which was the most seismic economic event of postwar history. But in fact the answer would be this: the
I holidayed in Malta last month with my partner, having chosen it because it was on the ‘green list’. Foolishly, I assumed this would mean we could waltz back to the UK without any hassle. I was wrong. We needed a test before departing Malta. Within a few minutes of looking on the Malta airport
There’s a biopic released this summer, Roadrunner, about the late great chef, writer, bon viveur and TV presenter Anthony Bourdain. It recounts the many invaluable lessons Bourdain taught, such as: never eat the lower colon of a warthog; never order fish in a restaurant on Monday (it will probably be three days old); and, most
