Marks & spencer

Thursday

Declan Lyons

Resist the cult of ‘picky bits’

We are, according to Marks & Spencer, in ‘picky bits’ season. I cannot bear the tweeness of it all. M&S is surely mere days away from launching a ‘Paddington Bear picky bits picnic range’. In search for an antidote to such horrors, I go on my annual pilgrimage to Bouchon Racine, which starts on Westbourne Park Road at midday, sipping Beamish Irish stout in The Cow. It is reputed to be David Beckham’s favourite London pub and is one of an increasing number of English pubs piggybacking on the phenomenal appetite for Guinness by serving alternatives to the Black Stuff. Beamish and Murphy’s are popping up on taps across the capital and we are the better for it.

Wednesday

Flora Watkins

Happy 40th birthday to M&S’s ‘gin in a tin’

Cast your minds back, if you can, to 1986. A different era. The nation rejoiced as a jolly redhead married the Queen’s favourite son. Britain had a cast-iron prime minister who looked set to go on and on, with nary a dent to her patent leather handbag. A first-class stamp cost 17 pence; the average family home only a little more. There was a Big Bang in the City and a larger one at Chernobyl. And, in the nascent ready-made drinks market, something similarly seismic happened: Marks & Spencer launched the bevvy that spawned a thousand imitators, the ‘gin in a tin’. This epoch-defining moment passed me by at the time (I still had a few years left at primary school). When I was a 90s teen, it was alcopops that commanded the headlines and moral panic.

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Has Downing Street calculated the real cost of quarantine?

Doing the math, as the Americans say, became this column’s theme after I abandoned another planned trip to France. Seven days in the Dordogne (where last week’s Covid infection rate was just 2.9 cases per 100,000) would have cost me 14 days lockup on return, so I spent the weekend doing arithmetic instead. As I tried to calculate the real cost of what I have called ‘kneejerk quarantine rules driven by focus-group fear’, my notebook began to resemble a rogue Ofqual algorithm — but here’s the simplified version. Let’s start with the 600,000 Britons reportedly caught by the quarantine returning from Spain last month and the 150,000-plus in France who missed last Saturday’s 4 a.m. deadline.