Last Thursday I was volunteer driver for the day for a Heartbeaters’ outing. Heartbeaters is a local exercise and social club for people recovering from heart attacks that meets weekly (and perhaps weakly) in the Baptist church hall for an hour of gentle physical jerks. We went to Greenway, Agatha Christie’s house on the east
It’s a proud day when your boy goes for his first job interview with a career in mind and says he wants to borrow your suit. He left school two years ago, aged 16, knowing a bit about the Nazis and how to bake a scone and that’s about it. He gained no qualifications, something
The help-yourself breakfast buffet was a single, waxed carton of orange juice (made from concentrate), and a stack of small upturned glasses. I filled one of these, tipped it down my throat, poured another and bore it to a table set for one beside the swing service door leading to the kitchen. A grubby laminated
The average age of the residents in our village here on the south Devon coast must be up in the seventies. Every time I answer the door the person standing there is panting and leaning on a stick. There was a murder in the village a couple of years ago. This man battered and stabbed
I owe English Heritage an apology. In last week’s column I was scornful of the content of the short historical documentary they show every half hour on a screen suspended above the ruins of Lullingstone Roman Villa. Specifically, I took issue with the idea expressed in the film’s narrative that Romans — or Romanised Britons
There was this evil Albanian gang specialising in kidnapping young girls, forcibly addicting them to heroin and selling them on to wealthy Arabs as sex slaves. To simplify their operation and reduce shipping costs, the gang had decided to concentrate their efforts on kidnapping middle-class Californian girls arriving at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.
‘My life’s over, doctor,’ I said. ‘A young man like you! Nonsense!’ he said, peering at me over his half-moon glasses. He was that wonderful combination: a fat man squeezed into an old-fashioned waistcoat. Occasionally, he mopped the perspiration from his brow with the handkerchief he kept in the outside breast pocket of his jacket.
The bride was several minutes late arriving at the church. Her side of the congregation were farming people, and while we waited, and the choir sang, the bloke on the pew beside me showed me photos of his new Bedlington terrier, Archie. He did look a handsome chap. My one ambition is to keep a
I can feel a tremendous draught of change affecting me,’ said Dave, waggling his fingers at us as if playing a chest-high piano. ‘It’s the strongest, most noticeable draught I’ve felt for 20 years. You can feel the draught, can’t you?’ The meeting, last Friday night, was entitled ‘The Saturn-Uranus Oppositions of 2008–9 and the
I first came across the book Iron John: Man and Masculinity by Robert Bly when I saw it being clutched in the bony old fingers of the man that used to chair meetings of our local Alcoholics Anonymous group. At the end of one of our weekly meetings he held up this book and pointed
I’m down in the bar underneath the stand at half time and everyone’s exceedingly jolly. The team isn’t playing badly for a change. At least we’re trying. Plus, we’ve got a new bloke who can actually pitch over an accurate corner kick. And the sun’s shining. The police run a tight ship at football matches
What rain! And what gales! No wonder sales of thermal underwear have shot up by 50 per cent already this year. I live a stone’s throw from the beach and I haven’t had a dip in the sea once yet, let alone done a stint relaxing on the beach with the kids. And along at
I’m in the pub before the first match of the new Premiership season, a pint of lager in each hand, and I’m thinking here we go again, another nine months of the same old overpriced, overhyped rubbish. The same old faces are pushing their way into the packed bar — though some are browner than
Under a low oak-beamed ceiling, three middle-aged men were perched on stools around the bar. One of these greeted me, walked around to the other side of the bar and asked me what I was having. He wasn’t the landlord, he said. The landlord was busy out at the back for a moment. There was
As we went in, our hostess mentioned that the restaurant had three Michelin stars, but at 78 years of age the chef felt he would rather live without the daily pressure of living up to three stars and had requested Michelin to reduce it to two. We were shown to our table and I chose
‘Gordon, can I have your autograph?’ I said, offering pen and small notebook folded back at a new page. I’d butted into his conversation, but he swung round in his seat and smiled pleasantly up at me and took the pen and notebook and inscribed his name. ‘You’re a great man, Gordon,’ I said, as
Last month I noticed that the only poem I’ve ever written was a suitable candidate for the local literary festival’s poetry competition, whose theme had been announced as ‘landscape as muse’. So I dug it out of the drawer and had another look at it. I thought the poem excellent. One of the competition rules
I rested my chin on my hand and watched the passing scenery all the way to London. For most of the journey the sky was filled with towering black clouds and from time to time rain smashed against the window. The train seemed to be racing just ahead of a deep, fast-moving depression travelling west
I’ve not been to Pamplona’s famous week-long ‘running of the bulls’ and bullfighting fair of Saint Fermin since 2002; but every year since, on 6 July, at midday, when the town council lets off the rocket signalling the start of the festivities, I’ve felt a pang of regret that I’ve once again failed to manage
An extraordinary email from theatre critic Mr Lloyd Evans arrived in my inbox last week. He’d written a play, it said, a two-hander, and one of the characters was based on me. He’d based the character on me after we’d met at a Spectator Christmas lunch five years ago. The play was opening at the