In 2017, David Lloyd Clubs took out a long lease on the privately owned sports facility at the end of my road. It used to be called the Park Club, but the new leaseholders, having spent £9 million tarting it up, proposed to call it ‘David Lloyd Chiswick Park’. As a proud resident of Acton,
I don’t know what I’d do if QPR banned me from Loftus Road for the next two-and-a-half years. It was bad enough not being able to go to games during lockdown, but the thought of all my mates attending while I was stuck at home would be devastating. When the Rs are playing at home
By the time you read this, my son Ludo will be in South America, where he’s gone for what remains of his gap year. He deferred his university place and has been working in a pub since he left school, trying to earn enough money to go travelling. I made the mistake of telling him
The UK Health Security Agency is sufficiently concerned about the growing number of measles cases in the West Midlands that it declared a ‘national incident’ last week. According to official figures, there have been 216 confirmed and 103 probable measles cases in the region since last October. The cause? The uptake of the MMR vaccine
My column from a fortnight ago seeking advice about how to limit my alcohol intake has produced a huge response – and not just from readers. At a dinner last week to commemorate Paul Johnson, a famous historian told me how he manages to be so prolific while still enjoying several glasses every night. He
The death of Derek Draper, the former Labour party apparatchik, got acres of press coverage, with tributes pouring in from the great and the good, including Tony Blair. But reading the obituaries, I couldn’t help feel that they didn’t do justice to the man I first met in the early 1990s, and for a time
My New Year’s resolution is to cut down on my drinking. I’m not talking about bringing it within the NHS’s recommended limit, obviously. I’ve never met anyone who confines their alcohol intake to 14 units a week, which amounts to a bottle and a half of wine, ideally spread over many days. I’m thinking of
One of the things I look forward to most about Christmas is the football, something that’s particularly true if you’re a fan of a team in one of the lower tiers. Premier League clubs play 38 games per season, not counting the FA Cup, the Carabao Cup and any European competitions they happen to be
I’ve always had a soft spot for the Garrick. Named after an 18th-century theatrical impresario, it was established in 1831 as a club where ‘actors and men of refinement and education might meet on equal terms’, and in the intervening years it has admitted members of other equally disreputable professions – lawyers, writers, surgeons, journalists.
I was at the march against antiSemitism in London on Sunday, but did not witness the arrest of Tommy Robinson. I’m thankful for that because I wouldn’t have known how to react in my capacity as head of the Free Speech Union. Whether the Met was right to arrest him (and subsequently charge him) requires
According to a friend who sold a successful consulting business a few years ago, the problem with employing middle-class Britons, unlike Americans, is that there’s a summit to their ambitions. Once they’ve earned enough money to trade in their BMW for a Porsche, install a new kitchen and create an attic room with a dormer
On Armistice Day I made my way to Parliament Square with some vague notion of protecting Churchill’s statue. I’d discussed the need to stop it being defiled by pro-Palestinian protestors a few days earlier with a group I’m involved with called the British Friends of Israel, but in my head this had been a theoretical
Many of my conservative friends are beginning to catastrophise about the future of Britain in light of the pro-Palestinian protests that have erupted in our major cities over the past month. ‘I think you’re screwed,’ an American philosopher told me on Monday. ‘You should have raised the alarm about immigration from Muslim countries 25 years
I was disappointed to learn that Rishi Sunak has reconsidered his opposition to a bill banning conversion therapy. Not because I’m in favour of it, obviously. The baffling thing about Sunak’s change of heart is that conversion therapy, as commonly understood, has been banned in this country for years. As the government’s own briefing on
You almost certainly haven’t heard of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), although you probably should have. It’s a BBC-led consortium of the world’s most powerful news, social media and technology companies that seeks to cleanse the internet of ‘disinformation’. It carries out this mission by doing its best to discredit sites that challenge the prevailing
By the time you read this I’ll be 60, having passed that milestone on Tuesday. My older friends tell me that turning 60 is like having to give a speech in public – the anticipation is worse than the reality. Once it’s in your rear-view mirror, you quickly forget about it and instead start looking
In spite of my dodgy right hand – caused by an injury to my radial nerve – I decided to go stalking in the Highlands last weekend. Recovery from such injuries is quite slow, but enough mobility had returned to my trigger finger for me to give it a whirl. Invitations to hunt stags in
I first realised something was wrong with my hand last Thursday evening. I’d been invited by a friend to go shooting at his grouse moor in Yorkshire and the bedroom I’d been assigned had a stiff wooden door. After a hearty supper, I returned to my room and gave the door a shove with my
Trying to work in my garden shed at this time of year is tricky. I will be crouched over my keyboard, face screwed up in concentration, when suddenly there’s a tremendous bang just above my head. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a conker falling from a horse-chestnut tree and hitting
Not everyone welcomed Rishi Sunak’s announcement last week that he would ban the XL Bully under the Dangerous Dogs Act. This American crossbreed is responsible for nearly half the deaths caused by dogs in the UK between 2021 and 2023 and hit the headlines recently after a video emerged of one attacking an 11-year-old girl,
