Dear Mary… My husband and I have been invited to stay for Royal Ascot-at-York this year with an old friend who lives close to the racecourse and with whom we have stayed many times before on non-racing occasions. The invitation was extended some months ago, but I have just received a letter from our hostess
A few years before his assassination in 1908, King Carlos of Portugal published a book on the tuna, its distribution and the various species of the fish. I am not aware of any other reigning monarch having written a book on fish, and it may have been Carlos’s most important legacy. In those days, the
With a clamour of various cup finals due to close out the winter’s activities — and with anniversaryitis so fashionable — I am surprised to have read nothing on the infamous Khaki Cup final of 1915, especially as it was the first notable match played, in only their tenth year of existence, by the team
Dear Mary… Q. A man I cannot avoid at drinks parties is now sixtysomething and, after years of having been highly sought after by women, now lives without a woman and so has lost it slightly in terms of his personal grooming. That does not bother me. What does bother me is that he has
Dotted about the house is the occasional sporting print. Flash, bang, wallop, what a photograph! At the top of our staircase is Herbert Fishwick’s imperishable study at Sydney in 1928 of Hammond’s pluperfect cover-drive -— coiled power, poise, omnipotence, and with the famous blue handkerchief peeping from his pocket. Among the family snaps and sepia
Dear Mary… Q. My wife and I have been invited to an election-night party being given by neighbours of the opposite political persuasion to ourselves. We are very fond of these people but they are very much New Order and we are very much Old, so, to keep things harmonious, the subject of politics is
Humphrey Bogart once complained that the trouble with the world was that ‘everybody in it is three drinks behind’. He would have liked the three Irishmen ahead of me on the track to Esher station after Saturday’s Betfred Gold Cup meeting ended the 2004–5 jumping season. ‘Jasus, it was cramped in there, never seen such
Obligatory at election time are party leaders compelled to treat voters as dolts by declaiming lifelong devotion to the people’s game. In 1997 Mr Blair made a complete idiot of himself with a tear-inducing reverie of a childhood on the terraces at St James’ Park drooling over Newcastle United’s Jackie Milburn — but without checking
Dear Mary… Q. Further to your letter regarding the telephone habits of foreigners, would they by any chance be Greek? Married for 20 years to a Greek, I am aware that no convention attaches at all to what we consider to be good manners. Calls will be placed and accepted at any place and any
An Indian friend with whom I have been staying in the Nilgiri Hills was asking what had happened to the whitebait which he used to enjoy years ago in England, during his time at Cambridge. In those far-off days whitebait appeared on restaurant or pub menus as a starter with the same frequency as egg
‘The Real General Election’ trumpeted a cynically astute headline in the Daily Mirror last week over a large blue campaign rosette bearing the picture of Frank Lampard alongside a red one framing Steven Gerrard, respective midfield dynamos of Chelsea and Liverpool football clubs which relishingly meet on Wednesday in the first semi-final leg of Europe’s
Dear Mary… Q. My sister-in-law, whom I am fond of and who is very generous, has an annoying habit of inviting herself to the house whenever she likes, usually at very short notice. Each summer there is a music festival in a village near me. She happened to call on me last year at that
I am taking my mother’s cousin Norma and her husband Harry out to lunch and I want them to have a good time, not just because I love Norma to bits but also because… nope, that’s it actually. She used to babysit us when we were little and would make us eat our supper backwards,
For the Beach Boys it was California Girls who were sans pareil. For Chas and Dave it was the Girls of London Town. But this column is dedicated to the girls of Merseyside. On Grand National Day at Aintree, it was wet and windy. Umbrellas turned inside out, racecards disintegrated to sodden pulp, rain seeped
The Windsor wedding at least, one trusts, signalled the end of some tiresome weeks for the royal family. So trying, in fact, that it would certainly not have noticed a final pesky shaft before the dissolution of Parliament which had a group of northern MPs bleating about royalty’s apparent preference for rugby union over its
Dear Mary… Q. I am a picture framer. The other day I drove up to London to drop off a picture at the house of a client. While I was there, I asked if I could use the loo. Once inside I saw that there were some fairly nasty ‘marks’ in the lavatory itself. For
Forget moons, suns, solstices and altered clocks, for half the world spring officially sprang on Wednesday when the 142nd edition of Wisden was launched with a banquet at London’s Inner Temple Hall. Eighteen-sixty-four was memorably busy: down the slope from the Inner Temple, they began building the Thames Embankment; Clifton Suspension Bridge was opened; General
Dear Mary… A number of correspondents wrote in regarding the problem (26 March) of what to call the unmarried mother of one’s son’s child. Here is a selection. Q. Oh Mary, I love it when you go all family values! Yes, yes, you are so right to stop the rot! Partners forsooth! Even worse are
Until the 1980s, England vs Northern Ireland was a calendar annual. Then the ‘Home’ championship was brutally abandoned. So to those of a certain generation last week’s soccer fixture seemed surreal. As surreal, I daresay, as the play which opens in Stockholm next Friday — British playwright Nick Grosso’s depiction of a randy Swedish coach
Dear Mary… Q. As a single person I invite many people over for dinner. Invariably the numbers are not equal, but I go to immense pains to get a mixture of guests who will find each other interesting, and also try to cook something special and delicious. The return invitations are invariably of the ‘take-us-as-you-find-us’