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Saturday

Sybilla Hart

How I drove away the Range Rover bullies

A few weeks ago, I was driving four of my children to school in my tinny, battered Toyota. We were running late – as per usual – and were speeding – or, rather, chuntering – down a particularly treacherous road. Of all the questionable surfaces in my area of rural Essex, this one is notorious: marked by a huge pothole the size of Snoopy the dog’s head, which bleeds into a smaller, gloopier crater. As I was trying to navigate it, however, a large shadow zoomed into sight in my rear-view mirror. With a jolt and a tremendous bang, it pushed me, my family and my poor, beaten-up Toyota into

Friday

Penworthy

Three bets for Haydock and Ascot

Herefordshire trainer Tom Symonds has his string in fine form with four winners from his last eight runners for a strike rate of 50 per cent over the past fortnight. Even his supposed no-hoper Gaelic Saint comfortably outran her odds at Warwick yesterday when second at 50-1 in a mares’ novices’ hurdle. Tomorrow one of Symonds’s stable stars NAVAJO INDY will try to keep up the good work for the yard at Haydock when he contests the Betfair Stayers’ Handicap Hurdle (2.25 p.m.) in search of a first prize to winning connections of nearly £57,000. At six years old, this progressive and consistent hurdler should be reaching his peak and Navajo Indy shapes as though this three-mile trip, which

Arabella Byrne

Long live the yummy mummy

Yummy mummies everywhere, put your Veja trainers and frill-collar shirts away, because last week the Times issued a stinging broadside. Being labelled a ‘yummy mummy’ is apparently now so derogatory as to be an ‘almost cancellable offence’. The Yummy is dead, the headline declared, while my phone blew up like the fourth reactor at Chernobyl as Yummies far and wide forwarded me the article. ‘We are not dead!’ many fulminated, while others were more concise: ‘That’s just bollocks; I’ve never worn barrel jeans in my life.’ Detailing the sartorial transformation of Yummies into so-called ‘cool mums’, Times fashion editor Harriet Walker wrote that ‘in a bid to put as much clear water as possible’ between herself and the cohort that came before her, the Yummy is now the ‘cool mum’ with a look that is ‘less sleek, more knowingly scruffy’. Where once the

G.V. Chappell

Inside the mind of a modern-day heretic

When I was growing up, it was generally accepted (unless you were a football hooligan) that, however much you disagreed with someone, they were entitled to their opinion. You listened, occasionally interjecting, and then made your case – sometimes forcefully. In the end, you might agree to disagree, but you didn’t harbour any enmity. These days, the idea that a person is free to hold their own beliefs, especially if they run contrary to your own, is considered laughably old-fashioned. The aim now is to silence that individual. If necessary, you eviscerate them, figuratively – usually online. Sometimes, tragically, their views are deemed so unpalatable that they’re silenced for good.

Wednesday

Angus Colwell

Domino’s has fallen

There are few culinary experiences like the first bite of a Domino’s pizza. The finest N25 caviar or a perfectly seared lobe of foie gras surely can’t compare to the ecstasy that comes from that mouth-cutting cornmeal that they sprinkle all over the base, or that sweet, cloying ‘cheese’, or those tart, dancing cups of pepperoni. In these moments, resistance is futile. It’s not a question of whether this is the best takeaway pizza there is, or even the best food there is. It’s a question of whether this is the best thing there is. Of course, we know how it ends. Fifteen minutes later, caked in sweat, parched, filling yourself up

Alexander Larman

The death of the bloke film

If you saw the Edgar Wright–Stephen King adaptation The Running Man in the cinema last weekend, with Glen Powell as the eponymous fugitive in a dystopian future, then you were one of the relatively few. The film has flopped at the box office, with audiences resistant to Powell’s charms and Wright’s visual pizzazz, and in a tricky year for King adaptations. It’s not been helped by some idiotic remarks the author made at the time of Charlie Kirk’s assassination; there will probably be fewer big-budget films based on his work in the future. Yet The Running Man’s failure also suggests that there is a wider issue at hand, and that

Graham Boynton

The best American band you’ve never heard of

Earlier this month, the best rock band to have come out of America in decades played London’s Roundhouse in front of 3,000 very excited British fans, all of whom sang along to every song the Alabamans played. It was the best gig I’ve been to in years, mainly because the Red Clay Strays are musically so damned good and that smart British audience got everything they were offering. It had that rowdy, joyful atmosphere that Faces gigs did in the early 1970s. Stay with me, Spectator readers. While our collective, more sophisticated, tastes may lean towards Wagner, Chopin and Mozart and, at a push, Miles and Monk, there will always

Tuesday

Tanya Gold

My murderous, malfunctioning Aga

People always divine themselves through material goods: hence the obsession with the Aga, recently detailed by my friend Rachel Johnson in these pages. Rachel loves her Aga – well, her Agas, she has two – because it needs to be defended from bourgeois socialists who don’t have Agas: they just want them, because self-deception is the defining characteristic of the bourgeois socialist. Me, I hate mine. I used to love her because she made me feel upper middle-class, which I’m not, and now I know I’m not, and I’m glad I’m not, please take her. Of course, Agas are class signifiers. An Aga is like the last vestige of the