I have been reading with interest the articles in the press about the Afghan family that is supposedly living in a £1.2 million council house. You see, the house in question is just round the corner from mine and if it really is worth £1.2 million that means Acton has been unaffected by the credit
I cannot help feeling a certain affinity with Peter Mandelson. Like me, he has been given a number of high-profile jobs, only to lose them in slightly dubious circumstances. Yet somehow he always manages to bounce back. He is the political equivalent of a Weeble: no matter how near he comes to toppling over, he
Disciplined, cheerful, humble and truly nice -— Simon Pegg is everything I’m not It is a strange experience interviewing the actor who has just played you in the film of your life. Simon Pegg has been cast as yours truly in How to Lose Friends & Alienate People and the first thing he does is
To my astonishment, the tsunami that swept through the global financial markets last week actually affected one of my neighbours. When the credit crunch extends as far as Acton, you know Gordon Brown’s in trouble. It turns out the man in question was an employee of Lehman Brothers. He’d managed to secure a job there
What a glorious spectacle it was at Doncaster last Saturday. And no, I don’t mean Frankie Dettori launching himself at Sir Michael Stoute like an exuberant four-year-old vaulting into a parent’s arms for a hug, or even the mildly embarrassed trainer, a bonhomous but stiff-backed bear of a man, wiping off the smacker of a
It was the call I’d been dreading. Roger Cashmore, the Principal of Brasenose College, phoned to ask whether I would be willing to give a speech on behalf of the alumni at the College Gaudy. It was the 25th anniversary of the class that had matriculated in 1983 and I had already RSVPd. How was
By the time you read this I may be dead. I have been pressganged into taking part in the London Duathlon this Sunday in order to raise money for the Chelsea and Westminster Health Charity. A canny young man who works for the charity noticed a reference to the paediatric unit at Chelsea and Westminster
The one advantage of missing last Saturday’s race day at Sandown, thanks to being encased at the time in a throbbing MRI scanner at St Thomas’s Hospital, was the chance of going Sunday racing instead at Folkestone. Posh it may not be. Trainer George Margarson and I were probably two of only ten people on
In the current issue of Empire there is a piece by Bob Weide, the director of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, in which he says that the reason I was banned from the set of the film is because Kirsten Dunst insisted on it. I was not aware of this until now, but
I am currently in Cornwall where I am spending the last week of August with my family. I cannot claim to have been basking in sunshine — the weather here is no better than the rest of the country — but I am luxuriating in the warm glow that comes from being on an environmentally
Some at least of the 71 vehicles I’ve owned (68 if tractors don’t count) are probably best excused by a weakness for romantic impracticality. It was never inherent impracticality that attracted me but something else about them — rarity, unusual histories or locations, coincidence, the appeal of rescue. Hence the Daimler Conquest Century convertible, the
Who would ever have thought that two wheels could prove as exciting as four legs? Watching the triumphs of Chris Hoy, Bradley Wiggins, Ross Edgar and Rebecca Romero in the Olympic Velodrome I cheered myself hoarse. Frankie Dettori might have difficulty managing a flying dismount from the mechanical steeds on which they scored their successes,
New York’s Eurotrash exude a preening self- regard that makes me sick to my stomach In New York, the big story of the summer is that the Eurotrash are back. Thanks to the weak dollar, rich Europeans have been descending on the city by the jet-load, irritating the locals by referring to ludicrously overpriced luxury
These days, I can’t even afford to rent a trailer on Shelter Island As a young man living in New York, I used to club together with four or five friends every summer and rent a house on Shelter Island. About 80 miles from New York, it is close enough to the Hamptons to enjoy
Where there’s a will . . . Observing a short-eared owl beating over the marshes like a huge, predatory moth, an osprey finishing off the fish meal he had snatched a few minutes before from Loch Don, an otter carrying home his supper across a rippling inlet were highlights of a few days on the
At first, I thought the reason the British Consul General in Los Angeles had agreed to have lunch with me was because he knew who I was. Before setting off on my annual pilgrimage to Hollywood, I had emailed Bob Peirce to see if he might be able to squeeze in a quick drink. I
There have been many wise and learned discussions about the impact the internet has had on journalism. However, one area that has been neglected is the impact it has had on the egos of journalists. I don’t mean the bruised feelings that Matt Drudge’s success has caused among the higher echelons of the American intelligentsia.
I once bought a house from a chap who insisted that Shakepeare’s entire output had in fact been penned by Francis Bacon. Be that as it may, Bacon did come up with the odd pithy insight, as when he argued, ‘Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age and old men’s nurses.’ Lately, I
Should I have forced myself to accept a diseased prisoner’s licked spoon? Like most Englishman, how well mannered I am depends upon the social status of the person I am interacting with. If he is below me in the pecking order, I am unfailingly polite, bending over backwards to reassure him that I do not
I was told at a very early stage in my writing career never to seek revenge on critics. If you get a poor review, you just have to take it on the chin. To write a letter of complaint to the publication in question — or, worse, punch the critic on the nose — is