Mcdonald’s

Thursday

Nigel Farage

The OnlyFans model, the milkshake and me

What better start to a Monday than to attend Westminster Magistrates’ Court? I was there for the trial of the young OnlyFans model Victoria Thomas Bowen who threw a banana milkshake at my face on the day that I launched my campaign in Clacton. Unbelievably, she planned to plead not guilty despite the fact that the whole thing was caught on camera. Rumours that her reason for doing all of this was because I had unsubscribed from her page are untrue. There was the usual circus of media outside as I arrived, but Victoria still insists she didn’t throw the milkshake just to get publicity for her website. It was

Tuesday

Paul Levy

Nothing rivals a traditional Chinese banquet for opulence

In February 1985 I had the good fortune to be a guest in Hong Kong at the Mandarin hotel’s 21st birthday celebration, a lavish three-day reconstruction of the sort of imperial banquet given during the Qing dynasty by the Kangxi emperor (1654-1722) and his grandson the Qianlong emperor (1711-1799). Kangxi started the custom of banqueting during his tours of southern China – he made six between 1684 and 1707. These provincial feasts were relatively informal affairs, often held in a tent, quite different to the stifling protocol of the imperial court at Beijing, and combined some aspects of the ruling Manchu ‘Man banquet’ with the native Han Chinese ‘Han banquet.’

Thursday

James Bartholomew

The rotten legacy of communism in Albania

Our heavily laden taxi turned off the main highway from Tirana and started to negotiate the rough, one-track road. The road wound its way around the edges of the mountains until we reached the ruins of Spaç prison, once a slave labour camp in the communist era of Albania. Two three-storey buildings housed the large cells where 54 men at a time had lived and slept. They were required to work gruelling shifts, filling metal wagons with copper ore and pushing the along uneven rails, some of which were under water. If they failed to fulfil their quota, they would have to do a second shift. And if they failed

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

The increasingly irritating language of ‘love’

It is 17 years since we began to hear McDonald’s: ‘I’m lovin’ it.’ This was always annoying, but most of us could only object by asserting that one simply could not say: ‘I’m lovin’ it.’ It should be: ‘I love it.’ Yet I doubt we’d be more convincing by saying (truly enough) that love is a stative verb which cannot be conjugated in the continuous aspect. In that it resembles know, fear, own or hear. Anyway, apart from the great McDonald’s annoyance, I have become increasingly irritated by the widespread use of love followed by a clause introduced by that. An example in the Sun was someone enthusing about a