How are you coping during this cost- of-living crisis? Have you made your way to the food bank yet? I am interested to find out. On Tuesday I listened to an edition of Radio 4’s You and Yours for which listeners were invited to call in and explain how they were managing in these desperately
Fifty years ago I was hitchhiking down the Eastern Seaboard towards Miami overnight. It was midwinter, icy and way, way below zero. Through miscalculation, I had ended up being dropped near the Cross-Bronx Expressway. I walked up a ramp to the elevated carriageway and began trying to thumb another lift. Utterly stupid: no car was
After publishing 17 books, I’m no stranger to the publicity campaign. In my no-name days, my publicist would purr that my novel’s release would be ‘review-driven’ – which decodes: ‘We don’t plan to spend a sou on your doomed, inconsequential book.’ By contrast, as we’ve seen writ large with Prince Harry’s Spare, your volume can
Last week 100,000 civil servants from 124 government departments went on strike. This fact prompts a number of questions, not least – who knew there were so many government departments? Also, when was the last time anyone saw that number of civil servants? Since Covid, the most noteworthy thing about the civil service has been
There’s a new default conversation for Tory MPs at any Westminster drinks party: is this 1992 or 1997? Is the party doomed or not? In 1992 John Major became the only prime minister to have been 20 points behind in the polls and then gone on to win two years later. But in 1997, with
Once upon a time, a fox with a large bushy tail and a disingenuous smile changed his name from Reynard to ‘Chicken Little’ and applied for a post in a local hen coop. During the interview for the position, which was conducted by members of the Scottish National party, he wore red plastic wattles, which
I have a puzzle for the Metropolitan police – a mystery that only they can solve. Why, if the Met is so short-staffed, do they hang around in groups? Why do officers clump? Why are some crimes completely ignored, but at other minor incidents the Met appear en masse? In London side streets I come across
How many black cops does it take to commit a racist hate crime? The latest correct answer is ‘five’. That’s the number of policemen in Memphis who have been fired and charged with second-degree murder for the killing of Tyre Nichols. Last month Nichols, who was himself black, was pulled over by the officers. They
If Britain’s great flaw is the class system, America’s might be its obsession with classifying official information. There’s a reason ‘that’s classified, sir’ is a stock phrase in so many Hollywood films. Americans tend to revere elite secrecy in the same way British snobs worship aristocracy. You can own lots of land in America and
Aretha Franklin’s 1967 hit ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’ should be removed from the music streaming network Spotify because it perpetuates anti-trans stereotypes, according to a whole bunch of alphabet people with too much time on their hands. The spearhead of this attack on the Queen of Soul’s famous hit is a
I awoke in the small hours last week and began worrying about the Ukraine war. A friend had earlier taken me to task over the airy way I’d introduced an argument with the words ‘Once we’ve won the war in Ukraine’ – as though this was a simple matter and just a question of ‘when’.
Hockey is one of those games, like lacrosse, that alters as it crosses the Atlantic. In Britain, if a man says he is a passionate hockey or lacrosse player, he may get a certain ‘Fnar fnar’ response. In North America by contrast, it would be most unwise to ‘Fnar fnar’ at your average hockey player.
The University of Washington technology department has banned the word ‘housekeeping’. Not because the ‘problematic’ noun is overtly ist (ableist, sexist, racist, ageist…; by now, you must know the ist list). No, because it ‘feels gendered’. Would that they’d simply banned housekeeping. I hate scrubbing the shower. This month, the University of Southern California’s School
What self-respecting political leader would be seen in Davos? The World Economic Forum has become synonymous with sybaritic technocracy – champagne receptions, luxury chalets, £50 burgers and traffic jams of black limousines. David Cameron and George Osborne were in their element at these summits, sometimes staying to ski afterwards. But Rishi Sunak, a Goldman Sachs
When the mist lifts and we can see clearly the carnage caused by the trans madness, and we blink and wonder what in God’s name we did to our kids, I hope we recognise the true heroes of the saga. By this I don’t mean the Jordan Peterson types or even J.K. Rowling, so much
Monday was Martin Luther King Jr Day in the United States. And this year it was most memorable for two events. The first was the unveiling in Boston of a new sculptural tribute to the civil rights hero. Unfortunately, depending on the position from which you view this inept work of public art, it resembles
It is rare to find an example of public art which one can applaud, unequivocally, but I think I have found one in London. The educational group Black Blossoms is running a series of lectures as part of the Art on the Underground scheme making the case that – as I had long suspected –
When Rishi Sunak addressed his cabinet this week, he tried to strike an optimistic note. Despite Labour’s commanding poll lead, the misery of strikes and the deepening NHS crisis, the Prime Minister said progress was possible, but on one condition: ‘There are challenges we face,’ he said. ‘But when we are united there is nothing
Topiary is the art of making something be something it wasn’t. This is achieved by subtraction. By clipping away everything about a yew bush that isn’t a swan, the topiarist creates a representation of that bird in living foliage. The topiarist’s swan is wondrous, but spare a thought for the clippings. Formless, meaningless to the
Optimism can be surprisingly hilarious. In my last novel, two spouses agree to quit the planet once they’ve both turned 80, and the book explores a dozen possible outcomes of their pact. No chapter made me chuckle at the keyboard more than ‘Once Upon a Time in Lambeth’ – in which the couple don’t kill
