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The state of our defence Sir: Your article on the etiolated state of European, including Britain’s, defence, is spot on (‘The price of peace’, 27 April). Rishi Sunak’s belated conversion to increasing defence expenditure is welcome but is, frankly, too little, too late. What it most definitively does not do is place the UK on a

If I could ban one question ever being asked of me again it would be: ‘Are you on WhatsApp?’ I don’t know how many times I’ve answered this in the negative, 57,983 times at least, but the question just never stops being asked. Nobody wants to use even a fraction of a penny of the

If you want to understand Surrey, look at the house names. Keepers’ Copse, Meadow View, Weavers, Highfields… What do all these names have in common? They describe something rural that used to be there before it was destroyed to make way for the house named after it. Surrey is where London will one day join

The dynamics of the village can only be understood with reference to what’s happening to the parking. Unless you study the parking, you have no way of understanding the village. Not really. You may think you understand it, but you are just scratching the surface of the alliances and enmities that make the village go

This is the 47th year in a row that I have written a column for The Spectator’s Christmas issue. It began when I was a young 40-year-old, and is at present being written by an 87-year-old vet. The years have passed in an eye-blink. Recently I asked myself why do bad things happen to good

‘You coming to help us poo pick?’ said my friend Terry, in a desperate sounding voice message. The builder boyfriend and I were lying in the garden having a well-earned sunbathe on Sunday, his only day off. Meanwhile, as we full well knew, the builder b’s fellow livery customers were hard at work shovelling horse

The girl wound down her window, stuck her mobile phone out into midair, and started to take pictures of the sun. I was behind her Mini on the southbound slip road off the A3 to the Cobham roundabout. On the left was the backed-up turn for Hersham down the Seven Hills Road which is always

During the Afghanistan crisis last summer, Ben Wallace decided that he had what it took to be prime minister. He had suspected it before then, according to friends, but during the evacuation of Kabul the Defence Secretary came to a definitive conclusion. His prediction that the Taliban would take Kabul had been proved correct, when

‘Missing Dog, Please Do Not Call, Chase or Try To Grab Her!! She Will Run!!’ This notice, featuring the face of a cavalier spaniel, is once again pinned around the village where I live and all the neighbouring villages, country lanes and roadsides. I say again, because about six months ago an identical message was

After rushing our little spaniel to the veterinary hospital on the usual bank holiday emergency basis upon which all animals seem to get sick, we were held up by the most extraordinary fracas. The builder boyfriend carried her in, wrapped in a blanket, and we sat ourselves down anxiously to wait. But in the reception

When the vet had finished giving my horses their annual flu boosters, she reminded me the vaccination regime had changed. For the purpose of competing, horses must be vaccinated for flu every six months, which is something that had passed me by. What with worrying about human vaccines, I had not noticed this change in

The bank was having Transgender Visibility Day when I popped in to deposit some cash.The stressed-looking customers, meanwhile, seemed mostly like they were having Affluence Invisibility Day. One woman was complaining bitterly that £4,000 had been transferred to the wrong place and the bank wouldn’t give it back. I put my hand on the cash

My friend Emily, who once got an owl stuck to her hand, was bringing her son for a day with the ponies. Like all manic souls, Emily can produce both magic and chaos, and you never know in what proportions. Emily may appear eccentric but like Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory she always turns out

Since recovering from Covid, I seem to have quietly been developing supernatural powers. At first I thought I had simply lost my sense of taste and smell, but a year on the situation is more complicated than that, I am starting to realise. I can’t really taste or smell anything in the conventional sense. If

The window of the new shop was as brightly coloured as a circus entrance, and stuffed full of items bearing no relation to each other, from chocolates and candles to vases and old chairs. The unusual name, too, made the place seem like it might have some mystical, hidden purpose. The builder boyfriend wandered over

The lodger looked at me blankly and pronounced wearily, as though intoning something he was tired of parroting, that I was putting vulnerable people at risk by not having the vaccine. I stifled a yawn. Can anyone really still think this? A half-hearted argument of sorts ensued while I was washing up and he was

‘This is my father, and his pronoun is he,’ said the builder boyfriend, checking his dad into Accident and Emergency. ‘And how do we address you?’ said the personage at the reception desk. ‘You can address me as they,’ said the builder b, who was happy to go along with the way the hospital wanted

Trees glorious trees. People can’t get enough of them. They don’t want to take care of trees, they just want to plant more and more of them. We have so many trees not being cared for by our local council that I was utterly amazed to see volunteer do-gooders planting saplings around the village green

‘A diary?’ said the lady in the chintzy gift shop, pronouncing the word very much as Edith Evans said ‘handbag’ in the 1952 film of The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘a diary. Do you have one?’ I was standing in the middle of a shop so like one that would sell a

‘Do you have any questions?’ said the man at the insurance company after an hour of me trying to take out a new car policy. ‘No. I wouldn’t know how to ask you a question about what has just gone on even if I wanted to,’ I replied, because insurance is now so complicated there