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Quizzed on how best to assimilate a new culture, travel writer and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once uttered the famous line: “Drink heavily with locals whenever possible.” I never met the man, but still I miss him and his deft writing. The Opening a Bottle series is about getting pickled with people far cooler than I am, in whatever city I’ve washed up in.  It’s my first proper day of spring on home soil, and it’s a blinder. Not a cloud in the sky, and a glorious cool breeze wafting the scent of mown grass across Lime Wood Hotel’s sumptuous gardens. They’re bursting with color, flowers blooming in every direction. White stone walls are awash with lilac wisteria. I’ve driven down to rural Hampshire from London to meet lauded resident chef Luke Holder.

Whisper it — but Cockburn can’t help but love a funeral. Old churches, black clothes that take a few inches from the waist, the spread is always great and the wake is single-handedly the best after-party anyone, dead or alive, could ask for. But there are a few rules. The first, one that should be glaringly obvious, is not taking smiling selfies for Instagram. Now, Cockburn knows that for a funeral such as Queen Elizabeth II’s, photos are unavoidable. But it seems that the people at Meghan’s Mirror, the style blog devoted to Meghan Markle, are lacking in basic etiquette. A little over a month after the death of the Queen, Meghan’s Mirror has splashed photos of Meghan’s outfit at the events surrounding the Queen’s death on their blog's homepage.

Carnegie Mellon University told The Spectator they "do not condone" tweets from one of their professors that wished Queen Elizabeth II an agonizing death. Uju Anya, who teaches in the Department of Modern Languages, referred to Queen Elizabeth as the "chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire" and said she hoped her dying moments would be "excruciating". Twitter later removed the tweet for violating its terms of service. [caption id="attachment_39734" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Uju Anya Twitter Screenshot[/caption] "I'm not wishing her dead. She's dying already," Anya said in another tweet. "I'm wishing her an agonizingly painful death like the one she caused for millions of people.

"Oxford or Cambridge?" No, it isn’t just shorthand for which of Britain’s most famous universities you attended — or were rejected from. It’s also a question about your taste in weekend vacation spots. Oxford is an urban, bustling city, full of multiculturalism, wide-eyed gangs of tourists and a literary heritage that’s long since tipped over into cliché. Think Alice in Wonderland, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, even — God help us — Harry Potter, claimed for posterity because of its use of Christ Church as a filming location. But its Eastern cousin — decidedly not Cambridge, Massachusetts — is a very different proposition.

Manchester, England Making plans for a European city break this summer? Seeking somewhere with centuries of history and culture, fine wine and, above all, sweltering temperatures? There’ll always be Rome, Barcelona, Athens — but chances are you haven’t considered Manchester, the northern English industrial powerhouse that inspired Karl Marx to write The Communist Manifesto and gave the world the Smiths, Joy Division and Oasis (you know, the ones who wrote “Wonderwall”).