Oh dear, it was most ungentlemanly of me to laugh. But I couldn’t suppress a chuckle over the video showing Ursula von der Leyen, President of the EU Commission, quietly fuming at this week’s summit in Turkey after two caddish males bagged the only available chairs. Indeed, I suspect I was very far from alone in … Read more
Here’s an embarrassing confession — and I fear that I’ll never be admitted to polite society again once it’s out in the open: reader, I’m not at all keen on live theatre. Indeed, my heart used to sink before the lockdown on those mercifully rare occasions when kind friends would ring to say they had … Read more
Younger motorists may find it hard to believe what follows — and even my own jaw drops a little when I look back on it. But some of my own generation (I’m 67) may have had similar experiences to a family holiday we took in the car in the mid-1960s, when I was about 12 … Read more
The other day I had the joy of meeting our eight-month-old granddaughter for the first time since she was a very new baby indeed. Well, I say it was a joy — and it was certainly a relief to see her and her three-year-old brother after so long — but I’m sorry to report little Etta … Read more
Don’t ask me if Rishi Sunak has struck the right balance between borrowing lashings more money to keep the economy from total collapse and increasing taxes to pay some of it back in the far distant future. I freely admit that I’ve never begun to understand economics (which is one thing I seem to have in … Read more
Good old Kirstie Allsopp is right. Ironing tea towels really is a therapeutic experience — and God knows we could all do with more of those in these trying times. Indeed, I flatter myself that I write with a degree of authority, since I’m something of an obsessive ironer myself. What’s more, as long-suffering readers … Read more
Once in a while, even in these grim times, there comes a snippet of news to lift the most downtrodden heart. Such a morsel of cheer lifted mine this week, with the evidence in yesterday’s paper that young people have no business to sneer at us old folk when we suffer the occasional senior moment. For … Read more
From time to time on this page, I like to suggest modern contenders for the Kingsley Amis Prize, which I award every so often to the phrase I currently judge to be the most depressing in the English language. Set up in memory of the late whisky-loving novelist, it celebrates Amis’s famous declaration that the … Read more
Think of an idyllic English summer, and what is the first image that springs to your mind? If you’re anything like me — and there are still a fair few of us old dreamers left — you’ll see a cricket match in progress on a lovingly tended village green. Under an ancient oak tree by … Read more
Tonight I will be sleeping in the spare room — but not for the reason you may think. All right, I admit that our marriage, like so many others, has suffered its fair share of strain during all these months we’ve spent under house arrest. Indeed, even after 40 years together, we still find new things … Read more