Mary Wakefield

The sky was already murky at 4 p.m. when I locked my bike outside Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street. Inside, it was even murkier: wood-panelled corridors stretched off into the gloom, men in grey suits were wedged together, smoking Bensons and drinking bitter. No one looked even slightly like an Arch Priest of

On Friday morning I was drinking a cappuccino in the Piazza del Gesu in Naples with my friend Angus. The sky was free from clouds, the streets were free from other tourists, and no one seemed to care that I had parked my car illegally, facing the wrong way in the middle of a busy

At nine in the morning, Cumnor in Oxfordshire looks like the setting for a Miss Marple mystery. Cotswold cottages run around the outside bend of a narrow high street and on the other side a grassy bank rises up to a graveyard. Nothing moves except the tops of fir trees growing among the tombstones. Standing

Sir Crispin Tickell tells Mary Wakefield that George Bush’s ‘illegal’ war has brought shame on us all I’m on the telephone, talking to the editor of this magazine, trawling for last-minute background information, when Sir Crispin Tickell, GCMG, KCVO, our former ambassador to the UN, appears in the doorway. He looks alert, beaky, sleek, like

Last Saturday must have been a difficult day for St Paul. His cathedral, still covered in patches of scaffolding like pins supporting badly broken legs, was teeming, inside and out, with women in dog collars. In the crypt, an hour before the grand celebration of the tenth anniversary of the ordination of women to the

Mary Wakefield meets Nigella Lawson and finds that she is friendly, confident, beautiful — but nervous with it In a window-seat at the far end of the bar in the Rib Room of the Carlton Tower Hotel, Nigella Lawson, dressed in black, sits waiting for me. The lighting is mellow, the seats leather and her

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend, a man who has more postgraduate degrees than I have GCSEs. The subject of Darwinism came up. ‘Actually,’ he said, raising his eyebrows, ‘I don’t believe in evolution.’ I reacted with incredulity: ‘Don’t be so bloody daft.’ ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘Many scientists admit that

There is a joke in the Jewish community about a typical Jewish mother who travels to a remote Buddhist temple in Nepal. Eventually granted an audience with the revered guru there, she says just three words: ‘Sheldon, come home.’ The first trickle of Jews began to convert to Buddhism about 50 years ago. The beat

Don’t worry,’ said our guide, Niels Bryan-Low, his eyes bright with malice, ‘the only time a wild boar is really dangerous is if you get between a mother and her baby.’ A few minutes later, crunching across a patch of orange ferns, there was blur of movement to our right. Niels froze, sniper-style, and we

Right! You’ve got 40 minutes,’ says Nick Wood, Iain Duncan Smith’s spin doctor, in the manner of a game-show host. We are sitting round a table in IDS’s office. Nick has a large glass of red wine in his hand and I have water. Iain can’t have a drink, I soon realise, because it would

Don’t be silly,’ said my learned Tory friend Bruce, leaning across a plate of foie gras and peering at me over the top of his glasses. ‘It doesn’t matter whether they find any weapons of mass destruction; the war on Iraq was justified because it was fun. Our boys were getting bored; they needed a

I spent Tuesday evening watching Ashley, a 15-year-old blonde girl from Oklahoma, flirt with a British boy called PJ. ‘Wanna see some photos of me?’ asked Ashley. PJ grinned. ‘I think you’ll like them, they’re hot,’ said Ashley, and winked. A boy called Ghetto, whom neither of them had met before, interrupted the conversation. ‘Hello,

I find it difficult to remember, in retrospect, why I thought it would impress Ranulph Fiennes – a man who has crossed the Antarctic unaided and who sawed the ends off his own, frostbitten fingers – if I arrived to interview him on a bicycle. I could have gone by cab and been waiting calmly

Mary Wakefield has been getting to grips with the terrifying but comic world of the Daily Mail’s Lynda Lee-Potter Lynda Lee-Potter was grinning like a lizard in the top left-hand corner of her page in the Daily Mail last Wednesday. Below her photograph was the headline ‘Only one penalty for such evil’. The evil was

After Wednesday’s Tube strike, most Londoners will have decided again that the only solution is a bicycle. But there’s a dark side to cycling in the city. Since I bought my first bike a year or so ago I have been astonished by the outbursts of spittle-flecked fury pedestrians unleash upon cyclists. Any minor deviation