Before both codes of rugby muscled in briefly with a flurry of Test matches, a month or so ago who’d have imagined the two most compelling contests at the top of soccer’s Premiership this first Saturday of December would be Bolton Wanderers against Arsenal and Wigan Athletic’s neighbourly barney at Liverpool. Olde-tyme top-of-the-table ‘six pointers’.
It’s a Sunday and as our son doesn’t have any sporting engagements for the first time in 657 years my partner proposes a Family Day Out, a simple enough phrase always promoted in newspapers — The Best Family Days Out; Great Days Out For The Family — but one which always strikes terror in my
A confrère faced a daunting task last week. As golfing correspondent of the Times, it fell to John Hopkins to do the honours with the speech of acclaim at the induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame in Florida of his fabled predecessor Bernard Darwin (1876–1961), whom many consider the father of sportswriting. In
Q. I was rather hurt yesterday when I delivered my 80-year-old mother to the Carlton Club at 3 p.m. to meet her friends and have tea and the porter would not allow me in. ‘Madam, are you wearing jeans!’ Too true — Armani jeans, Jermyn Street shirt, Burberry mac, flat ankle-length leather boots and small
Down in his canal field on a damp November morning, Paul Webber’s horses were working in threes, hooves thudding into the resilient turf. This time it was Gift Voucher, Off Spin and Star Shot. ‘It’s such a lovely sound, horses galloping on good ground;’ declared the trainer, adding, ‘they can look good on the all-weather,
From the 1870s, soccer’s insular ‘home’ unions had simply played among each other. Incredibly, England did not invite a foreign nation over here for a game for fully 50 years after they’d first played Scotland in 1871. Even after beating plucky little Belgium by 6–1 at Highbury in March 1923, the haughty English were not
Dear Mary… Q. As an elderly art-lover, I was thrilled to be invited to the private views of exhibitions by both Julian Barrow and his brother Andrew. Alas, I see these take place on the very same night next week and, as I am now nearly 90 and practically bedridden, I really cannot risk the
Many of us, not being regular purchasers of the sturgeon’s eggs, will be unaware of the gravity of the caviar crisis. I have only just learnt that the population of the beluga sturgeon, which produces the best-quality caviar and lives mostly in the Caspian Sea, has suffered a 90 per cent decline in the past
Since its launch in 1989, Land-Rover’s popular Discovery has demonstrated that critical issues for motoring correspondents, such as handling and reliability, count for little when it comes to looks, comfort, usability and aspirations. Actually, that’s a little hard on the dear old Disco of that era. The V8 petrol version performed well and, although the
The one-off splendours of Pakistan’s captain Inzamam-ul-Haq offer a spicy tang to England’s first post-Ashes Test match which begins today in his hometown of Multan. The contrast with that soft-showered, gold-leaved autumn evening of hurrahs at the Oval seven weeks ago will be immense. Ancient Multan pitches its wicket on the very edge of the
Dear Mary… Q. My wife and I have an old and dear friend who lives abroad. She divorced her husband some years ago and lives alone. We are both very fond of her and are usually delighted to see her whenever she is in England. My wife has a timeshare in the Lakes which we
Having cruelly blackwashed the combined British Isles Lions tourists just four months ago, New Zealand’s athletic young rugby sadists are back in the old country intent on inflicting further pain with a Grand Slam against the four ‘home’ nations on successive weekends, beginning today in a defiantly hyped-up Cardiff. It is a centenary show: on
Dear Mary… Q. You suggest (22 October) that scrap suppers be served on site following private views in art galleries. May I suggest the very same practice might well reverse the decline in numbers of young people attending classical concerts? For friendless, new to London perhaps, but unpushy lovers of classical music, it would surely
These days the most conspicuous presence on the gritty streets of King’s Cross is not call girls and crack dealers but buttercup-yellow huddles of hard hats. Through the clouds of cement dust you can just about make out signs explaining that the hat-wearers are ‘considerate constructors’, motto: ‘Improving the image of construction’. This attempt at
‘Most of us are asleep most of the time,’ says Jamie Oliver in the new Sainsbury’s television commercial, possibly recorded before he went off to Italy with a film crew and production team for his much-needed break from the cameras. ‘Even when we shop we are sleep-shopping,’ he continues, ‘filling our trolleys with exactly the
There is a poignant sale next Wednesday at Bonhams auction house in Chester. Under the hammer is due a skip of spiritually priceless mementoes — shirts, boots, medals — belonging to the Hungarian Ferenc Puskas, one of soccer’s immortals. His family need the money to help pay the 78-year-old’s round-the-clock medical care in his Budapest
Dear Mary… Q. I have recently inherited a beautiful tapestry from an uncle of whom I was particularly fond, and who, I believe, was rather fond of me. While my cousin — who is shortly to move into her late father’s house — is happy to respect his wishes and let me have the tapestry,
There died last month the doyen of British motoring writers, an idiosyncratic, eloquent, deeply informed, erudite enthusiast: L.J.K. Setright. A bearded patrician, elegant and opinionated, intolerant of fools, mysterious and forbidding, his detestation of speed limits was as passionate as his fondness for strong Sobranie cigarettes (he died at 74). His style varied from the
If the English Premiership’s round-ball autumn has been imbued with a generally browned-off languor, it has at least been far more civil than the bad-blooded rancour of their ‘oval’ cousins. The Rugby Football Union spits more viperishly by the week at what it perceives as the derisive impertinence of the leading clubs. This month marks
Dear Mary… Q. I am an artist and will shortly be showing my latest works in a one-man show. I beg your advice on how I can circumvent the social difficulty which blights many private views — namely, what to do about having something to eat after the show? Clearly a two-tier system of those