Kirstie allsopp

The slippery business of catching a snake

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna It is strange how events elide and create a pattern whose significance remains elusive. I had just returned from a raid under the cover of the night on a huge field near our house a mile from the sea. I had about 50kg of ripe tomatoes in plastic bags in the back of my battered old seven-seater Land Rover Defender and was wondering if, as an impoverished father of six, I could use the Thomist defence: ‘It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another’s property in a case of extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes

My teenage Interrailing adventures

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna In my life I have nearly killed myself mainly with cigarettes and alcohol and dangerous journeys into the night. I have experienced what awaits you in those places but it is not the sort of thing you can easily talk about or even put into words. It is perhaps too secret. I am also usually skint, so all in all I do not exactly fit the bill as a solid and reliable father figure who commands respect. Yet I have six children, aged nine to 21, who live with me and their Italian mother, Carla, and I try to do my best. We have been talking about

In defence of Kirstie Allsopp

The jibe, commonly attributed to Napoleon, that England is a nation of shopkeepers, was at least a sort of compliment. Britons embodied, it seemed to suggest, the bourgeois virtues of thrift, industry, self-reliance and pragmatism. But what would a latter-day Napoleon see if he looked at us now? A nation of busybodies, bluenoses and snitches intent not on minding the shop but on minding each-other’s business. That’s the only conclusion to be drawn from the news that Kirstie Allsopp has been reported to social services for allowing her 15-year-old son to travel round Europe with a friend to celebrate the end of his GCSEs. Allsopp shared her pride in her son’s