We parked the car and spent a carefree hour on the beach, Oscar and I. The beach was a crescent of pebbles three miles long, and we were the only people on it. A recent easterly gale had driven the tide much further up the beach than usual, leaving behind it a pebble ridge, ideal
A week into the New Year I drove to town early to do a spot of shopping. The sun was shining, I felt well again, and I marched up the high street with a spring in my step. The still-thriving high street is predominantly Georgian, with here and there a few remaining Tudor merchants’ houses.
I was woken by my phone ringing. My boy. ‘What time is it?’ I said. ‘Ten past one,’ he said. ‘How are you feeling?’ This was said with a very obvious and unkind touch of schadenfreude. ‘Terrible,’ I said. I felt as though I might be dying, and the sooner the better. ‘Where are you?’
‘Come with me,’ said the barmaid, ‘to a party.’ It was around three and she was trying to close the pub and get everyone out. She seemed to be the one person in a hundred who was maintaining a degree of sanity. The other barmaid, for example, could hardly stand up. The sensible barmaid organised
I was standing on the pavement outside the Lahore Kebab House, Hendon, after a three-hour lunch, waiting for a minicab. Fifty of us had sat down at a flower-laden table to samosas and champagne, kebabs and Valpolicella. Amid a convivial uproar, our host had stood, tapped his water glass with his spoon, and made a
Royal Mail bosses have suggested to postmen that they should not accept a Christmas tip if it’s £30 or more. This is because under the terms of the new Bribery Act that sort of money could conceivably constitute a bribe. I’ve never been a postman, sadly, let alone a postman at Christmas. I don’t know
‘A race through the subways and streets of Paris anuses.’ Startled, I reread the sentence. Surely that couldn’t be right. To pass the time I was flicking through a programme of December’s films at the local art-house cinema. The sentence came in a synopsis of a French crime thriller. Then I realised it was a
As my bike had drawn attention to itself by being nicked, abandoned and found, I decided to renew our old friendship by taking it out for a ride. On Sunday afternoon I slung my leg over it and took it for an hour-long, 15-mile circuit that goes up hill and down dale and ends with
For 21 years my bike has leant against the wall just inside the garage door. On Monday morning it was gone. Nicked. I loved that old Dawes Galaxy. But I couldn’t work myself up into a state about its theft. I tried anger, I tried indignation, but without success. Good luck to them, I thought.
My grandson Oscar, now nearly two, hardly says a word when he and I are out together. It’s like being out with a dog the conversation is so one-sided. He understands well enough. He’s attentive and interested and usually in favour of anything you care to mention. But he barely speaks. Which is strange because
The book launch party was terrific. To those who put it on, and to everyone who came, I am a beggar even in thanks. A salute, too, to the 200-plus of you who entered the joke competition and to the 15 winners, every one of whom was the life and soul. A special mention in
Before I went to the party, I went to the pub for a pint. The pub was unusually quiet for a Saturday evening. Jay was on duty behind the bar. She leaned across the bar to embrace and kiss me. She had a terrible hangover, she said. I told her to have one herself, and
A big mouth, fewer taste buds and a wider gullet than normal means I’m a fast eater. If golloping your dinner was an Olympic event, I’d be knighted by now. Last week I equalled my personal best with a plate of roast pork, apple sauce, roast spuds, mashed swede and runner beans. We were four
That famous ideal pub of George Orwell’s, The Moon Under Water? Sounds boring to me. There’s no music, every customer is a ‘regular’ with his own chair and it is always quiet enough to talk. The barmaids call you dear (not ducky as they do in ‘raffish’ pubs). If singing breaks out in the Moon
A very sporting publisher has put together a collection of Low life columns and is publishing it in hardback on 3 November. In the evening there is to be a drinks party at The Spectator offices in Westminster to celebrate the occasion. The boardroom can comfortably accommodate around 50 vertical drinkers. Of these 50, the
On Sunday morning we got up early, met the guide, Khalila, on the hotel steps and went on a cultural landmark and shopping tour of Marrakesh. We’d done the Majorelle garden, which we all thought we liked. We’d done the Koutoubia mosque and the Jemaa el-Fnaa square. We’d had a look around an empty palace,
When my uncle was a boy, he said, he was leading a horse down a hill near North Weald in Essex. The horse was pulling a wagon loaded with cabbages, and my uncle had got down, he said, to assist the horse because the hill was a steep one. The war was on. The hill
Somewhat frayed around the edges after The Spectator’s ‘End of Summer Party’ I drove up to Norfolk to visit my country cousins. The corpses on the A143 told me I was getting deeper into the countryside. As well as the usual pea-brained pheasants, I saw a bloody badger, a broken fox and a magnificent, unmarked
The pub was taken over for a meeting. Every chair was occupied. The speaker’s words were being recorded by a sound engineer standing at a portable mixing console. The middle-aged audience was rapt, the atmosphere one of political and moral seriousness. Few were drinking. I mounted the only vacant bar stool and mouthed the word
My sister got married twice last week, both times to the same bloke, thank goodness. She was married on the Thursday by the state in a register office, and on the Saturday she and Stan stood in front of an Anglican clergyman in a church and asked God to graciously add His blessing to that