An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Few bluesmen have matched the success of John Mayall, ‘the godfather of British blues’, who died on Monday aged 90 at his home in California. In a career spanning more than six decades, he made 50-odd albums with an ever-changing incarnation of his band, the Bluesbreakers. His proselytisation of black American artists like Muddy Waters,
What’s the biggest division in life? Between clever people and stupid people? Between the good-looking and the ugly? No. The fundamental difference is between the ones who do things quickly and the ones who do them slowly. You know that friend who emails you back the moment you email them for a favour? Or the
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
Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. It has been… too long since my last confession. Picture the scene. I am in the kitchen, almost literally spinning plates. I should have been focusing, prioritising the bits that needed to get done, keeping an eye on the clock. Instead I’ve been mucking about, making an unnecessary
The Park is the new restaurant from Jeremy King, and it sits in a golden building to the north of Hyde Park, just off Queensway. This is an interesting district compared with Knightsbridge – it is still capable of reality – but isn’t every-where interesting compared with Knightsbridge? The Park is Art Deco of course:
We are blessed these days with a rare stream of jockey talent including the likes of William Buick, Ryan Moore, Tom Marquand and Rossa Ryan. Well clear of the pack though in the chase for the jockeys championship is former champion Oisin Murphy, and five minutes in the winners’ enclosure rather than on the track
The Olympics have been creeping up on us through the forest of top-class sport this summer. But now they’re here, the third time the summer Games have been held in Paris. The first was in 1900, and reflect what a very different place the world was then. There were old favourites such as track and
If ever a mental health diagnosis can be called ‘fashionable’, it’s ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The mere mention of it can trigger moans that it’s nothing but the latest ‘woke’ way to pathologise fidgeting, lack of self-discipline and bad parenting. So if you’re in that camp who rolls their eyes everytime you hear the term,
It’s great having toilets with warm seats that shoot water up your bum until you need somewhere to throw up. After eating two kilos of raw, vengeful tuna, I was leaning over a hotel loo in Osaka and all I wanted was to rest my clammy forehead on a cold plastic seat. Six hours earlier,
We had steered our narrowboat into the lock at Swineford on the navigable section of the Bristol Avon before 8 a.m., heading upstream, back towards Bath. Two and a half hours later, we were still there. We were stuck. Having worked the lock’s paddles, our boat had climbed the requisite 10 feet to be level
Ucas, the organisation in charge of university admissions, has announced that it’s bidding bye-bye to a crucial teen rite of passage. It is killing the personal statement. No longer will admissions tutors beetle their brows over flowing paragraphs about when you built an orphanage in Malawi using only a spoon, or how really, really passionate you
No matter how much you love music, going to a piano recital can be an uncomfortable experience. A sombre-faced pianist plays in an atmosphere of hushed reverence, perhaps swaying and grimacing to simulate profundity. If a sonata is performed, outbreaks of guilty coughing will occur throughout the audience between movements. It’s an unwritten rule that
When you live abroad for long periods of time, you get accustomed to certain foods which, returning home, you can’t find anywhere, and the sense of a habit unwillingly broken is acute. If the foreign country is Thailand or Italy, you stand a good chance of finding dishes approximate to those you’ve left behind in
I suppose you could say that I’m an ‘amateur’ artist, that art is my ‘hobby’. In fact no, I take that back. I’m no amateur hobbyist dabbler. I’m an artist. I’m a bloody artist. If you take something seriously, the hobby label grates. And I take art seriously. I might not be on track to
Trainer David O’Meara loves heading down from his North Yorkshire stables to plunder some of the big summer handicaps with his best horses. At the top of his list of aims are the most valuable contests at Glorious Goodwood and he doesn’t mind running three or four of his string in the same race to
I was surprised at the strong smell of marijuana smoke that wafted across Lord’s during the West Indies test match last week. Although there were occasional, passing whiffs throughout the ground, it was in the Coronation Gardens, where the psychedelically blazered MCC members and their friends meet for epic piss-ups, that distinct gusts of weed
The pop star Sam Smith appears not only to have a magic mirror which affirms that he’s stunning and brave, but also that he’s a lovely little thinker. During lockdown, self-isolating in his £12 million home, he filmed himself weeping because he was already bored with his own company. ‘I hate reading,’ he cried, suggesting
Can you imagine how great it must have felt to be a Pret a Manger executive in late 2019? There was a Pret restaurant. They’d just bought Eat and its 94 stores. Veggie Pret was taking over the south east. London mayoral candidate Rory Stewart said Pret was his favourite pub. There was a Twitter
‘If you are calling about sinusitis, sore throat, earache in children, infected inset bite from the UK not overseas, impetigo, shingles, or female-only uncomplicated water infections, speak to your local pharmacist.’ That is how my parents’ GP surgery now answers the phone. A recorded message telling you to go away for almost every illness you
It’s probably escaped most people’s attention, what with the football, the election, the Ukraine war, the horrors of Gaza, the assassination attempt and the revelation that the most powerful human on the planet has the intellectual sharpness of a daffodil. But in the past few weeks, the world of travel has been roiled by a
Liberal Democrat activists were reportedly told to ‘get out the Gail’s vote’, targeting people who visit the over-priced artisanal cafés. There are 131 Gail’s in the UK and around half are in Lib Dem marginals. If you’ve never come across one, think spinach, feta and filo pastry for £6, sold by a stressed Spanish girl
Age. At the Spectator party last week, the editor asked me how long I had been attending the festivity. I could not remember whether it had been since the late 1970s or not until the early 1980s. But change is not always for the worse. During the 1980s, dearly beloved Bron Waugh was in charge
After 250 years of American independence, a nation home to many of the smartest and most talented people in the world may have to choose as its leader one of two people, each of whom is in many ways worse than His late Majesty George III, the man whose role the entire system was designed
It’s 1 a.m. in our small cathedral city and car horns are honking in jubilation. From down the street comes the sound of smashing bottles, and a deep bellowing roar, growing louder as the ‘whooahs’ and the chants echo off Georgian terraces. Well, it’s a country town on a Saturday night; a certain amount of
I have been fond of vests ever since those plain white cotton ones we wore for primary school athletics in the long ago and mythically hot summers of the mid-1970s. No other garment in the male warm weather wardrobe is quite the same. A T-shirt isn’t as breathable, while a loose linen shirt even half
As an urban-dwelling, free-spirited 41-year-old with sleep issues and a whimsical trade – writing – having a baby posed many challenges. The chief of which has been having to constantly work with two other people: baby and baby-daddy. I vowed as the due date approached to get kitted up in ways that would feel reassuring, limiting the cannonball splash effect of
In 1987, when I was 19, I started at my first ‘proper’ adult job. This was as a lowly civil service clerk, or administrative officer – filing, basically. It was a post within the Lord Chancellor’s Department – as it was known then – but which today is called the Ministry of Justice, which doesn’t
Back in 1979, I took my grandmother and her friend Frances to Monty’s in Ealing. Monty’s was one of the early Indian restaurants in London. My nan was in her 90s, and it was her first curry. We ordered the usual array of dishes – the sizzling tandoori, the Bombay aloo, the dal. My nan
The Japanese singer, actor and heartthrob Matsumoto Jun, who I’ve always thought of as an Oriental David Cassidy (thus showing my age), will make his UK acting debut later this year when he appears in acclaimed playwright Hideki Noda’s very loose adaptation of the Brothers Karamazof at Sadler’s Wells. Jun is, not to sell him