Tolkien

Airport security was much on my mind last Friday afternoon. I had been due to fly from Heathrow to Zurich that morning, but the substation fire meant a switch to an afternoon departure from London City Airport. City is a business-oriented operation in every respect and one of its many efficient features is a baggage-checking regime that does not require you to separate your 100ml bottles of shampoo and shaving foam into a plastic ziplock bag. The X-ray machine and associated sensors are supposed to penetrate your luggage and identify anything dangerous with scientific precision. My heart sank when my carry-on bag was shunted off the conveyor belt and a

I’ve just bought Tolkien’s pub in Oxford. Well, to be more precise, I and more than 300 fellow drinkers have bought the Lamb and Flag, the 400-year-old Oxford pub where the Inklings group of writers – including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis – drank. Like so many pubs across the country, the Lamb and Flag closed, in January last year, thanks to the pandemic trading slump. Across the road, the Eagle and Child pub also closed, in 2020, because of Covid. Tolkien and Lewis drank there, too – they called it ‘the Bird and Baby’. It remains shut. What rare survival stories these two pubs are – or were. The