Arabella Byrne

This week, in honour of its 70th anniversary, the Feathers Association released photos of youths aged 14 to 16 at its annual Christmas charity ball. Among them, a young David Cameron is pictured poutingly draped around Laura Stanley. The Queen’s son, Tom Parker Bowles, stands with his black tie askew, laughing at the camera with

At a recent drinks party in Oxfordshire, I counted five men wearing Nehru waistcoats. Not one of these men looked like he was paying homage to the garment’s namesakes, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Not one looked as if they were genuinely taken with Indian fashion nor remotely bothered that they were wearing the same

Time was, a Barbour meant one thing: the classic Beaufort model that stank of wax, wet dog, and had pockets stuffed with cartridges from a shoot. Naturally, the late Queen Elizabeth modelled it best, standing at Balmoral in hers with her trademark neckerchief. There is an apocryphal tale that, like all die-hard Barbour devotees, the

Ten years ago, I decided that I should stop smoking. Before this decision, I had never given it a second thought. ‘Want to step outside for another? Yes please.’ Who cared about the wind blowing in from the Urals as we huddled around a lighter? Not I. Had I been ready to quit now, a

Way back in the noughties, Charles Moore observed that the Conservatives could learn a lot from the Boden story. ‘An individualistic, non-hierarchical, girly, aspirational, southern, 40 per cent internet-based, middle-class business, laid back but hard-headed. Yet, at the same time, it is quite traditional […] the way of life he is promoting is instinctively conservative’,

To my enormous pride, my six-year-old daughter is an excellent reader. In Reception, she raced through the colour-coded chart of Biff & Chip books with ease and wound up bored. So bored that she took to jumping off trees with increasing exuberance each playtime. She needed to be stretched, the school decided, with only a

At long last, the day has come. After nearly two months of summer holidays, institutions beckon their children back for another school year. The television will resume its status as a post-school treat rather than an indispensable tool to fill the dead hours between events. The kitchen will no longer resemble an all-day canteen, and

Benjamin Franklin famously observed that there are only two certainties in life, death and taxes. But there are in fact three certainties: death, taxes and bins. Of the three, bins occupy more of my thought life than my eventual demise, financial or otherwise. For a long time, bins used to be bins: receptacles for rubbish. You scraped the remains of your supper into

In a 1962 interview, Alain Delon pushes aside a carafe of red wine and explains that when offered his first cinema role, he didn’t really want it: je n’avais pas envie de faire spécialement ça. Delon, who died over the weekend at the age of 88, may not have been immediately seduced by cinema, but

Balanced rakishly on my late grandmother’s china parrot is a MAGA hat bought in 2016 when it seemed highly improbable that Trump would beat the walking pantsuit, Hillary. Much like my Vote Leave badge, I bought it as a piece of provocative fast-fashion and my ever-expanding archive of political merchandise from the last decade. I

I’ve never been seduced by the circus. As a motif in children’s literature, particularly taken up by Enid Blyton and Disney. In fact, as an animal-loving child, I think I found it cruel; I wanted Nellie the Elephant to pack her bags and say goodbye to the circus, I longed for her to slip her

It’s 7.54 a.m. and we are waiting for the doors of the Intermarché St Remy de Provence to open. A vast sense of excitement is building within our group that spans the ages of nine months to 68 years. My mother wants espadrilles, my husband wants wine, my brother-in-law wants cheese, the children want toys,

I’m in Provence for my annual jaunt to the land of bulls, Pernod and lavender. All over our small French village, fever for the Jeux Olympiques ‘24 builds: the Olympic rings hang in the window of the Pharmacie and the Papeterie, in the Cafe du Commerce on the Rue General de Galle the television blares all day with adverts for the opening

Last Monday, a group of 20 French rappers released a video entitled ‘No Pasarán’. Evoking the Republican resistance against Franco in the Spanish civil war and before that, the resistance of the French against the Germans during the Great War, the phrase called for people to resist Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. If last night’s

Just after Andy Murray made the winning pass that won him Wimbledon for the first time in 2013, he looked up to the sky in pain. Not laughing with joy as Djokovic does when he wins a slam or weeping graciously as Federer did before he quietly put on his Rolex, but a sheer plea

I’ve never liked Ascot. On the occasions when I have dressed up and flogged across the south-east on a series of trains to get there, I have always regretted it. The pinching shoes, the faux-snobbery of the Royal Enclosure, the traipsing around the grandstand that resembles an airport crossed with a shopping mall, the feigned interest in equestrianism, the footballers in toppers and

In the penumbra cast by the light of my phone, I can dimly see the wreckage of a night with a newborn baby: half-drunk bottles of milk, the tangled cord of the monitor, muslins strewn across the bed. It is 3 a.m. and the baby has gone back to sleep. I, however, am wide awake. Or rather, the consumer in me is wide