Arabella Byrne

Woodcote House, an all-boys’ independent preparatory school of 76 pupils, closed its doors for the last time on 4 July last year. Asked by the editor to write an elegy for the school, I set about making enquiries. Many ran cold. The website had been shut down. Requests to friends who lived in Surrey fizzled

It’s that time of year again. No sooner have you recovered from Christmas than the posh start talking about their skiing jaunts planned for the February half-term. But let’s use the term posh advisedly, because – make no mistake – skiing is now anything but. Where once flinging yourself down the Cresta Run may have

My husband and I share a bank account, and I don’t care who knows it. This detail lumps us in with many Boomer couples who have typically shacked up together financially – for better or worse, richer or poorer – for the duration of their married life. As (geriatric) millennials, our joint bank account therefore renders us something of an anachronism, but we’re used to this by now. We are outdated and unfashionable in our approach to many things,

In news that will surprise no one, it emerges that vegan children are thinner, shorter and – dare we say it – sicklier than their counterparts. A recent study by the University of Florence details how children who follow a vegan or vegetarian diet are deficient in vitamins and minerals and consistently exhibit a lower

A close relation of mine is taking Ozempic. I shan’t name them or give anything else away other than to say this: they are set to ruin our Christmas lunch. They know it, and we know it. Welcome to British Yuletide 2025 – a country where more than 1.5 million people are estimated to be using GLP-1 agonists such as Ozempic, Mounjaro and Wegovy, with the vast majority (90 per cent) obtaining the drugs

Sometime in mid-October, my husband and I begin our annual deliberation: should we host a village Christmas drinks party? The conversation is almost invariably instigated by my charming husband who, mindful of all the invitations we have shamefully yet to reciprocate, feels that we ‘ought to do it this year, at least’. Almost invariably, I am the voice of dissent.  The arguments I give against are motivated

Every few years, an obituary for the Sloane Ranger appears. In 2015, the Telegraph proclaimed their death. In 2022, Peter York himself, co-author of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, wrote a devastating piece in the Oldie on the ‘End of the Sloane Age’. In it, he cast existential doubt on the species altogether: ‘By 2021, there seemed to be every possible shade of Sloane around in London. But were they really Sloanes at all? It looked

All I seem to do these days is stand in the school car park having anguished, if largely pointless chats: the Mansion Tax chat. But let’s call it the Mansion Tax Mumble, since none of us seem willing to disclose the actual sum we paid for our houses. Soon we may not have to, since

‘He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden’. So goes the famous Horace Walpole quote about William Kent, the 18th-century landscape designer who saw the garden and its surrounding views as single and unified. Were he alive today, Kent might very soon leap over the ha-ha he designed at the Grade

Yummy mummies everywhere, put your Veja trainers and frill-collar shirts away, because last week the Times issued a stinging broadside. Being labelled a ‘yummy mummy’ is apparently now so derogatory as to be an ‘almost cancellable offence’. The Yummy is dead, the headline declared, while my phone blew up like the fourth reactor at Chernobyl as Yummies far and wide forwarded me the article. ‘We are not dead!’ many fulminated, while others were more concise: ‘That’s just bollocks; I’ve never worn

Economy fliers everywhere, rejoice! After a long stint of what can only be described as tight-fisted meanness, British Airways and other short-haul carriers including Virgin Atlantic have started to compete on service again. The trolley-dolly is officially back. Now, once you are (semi) comfortably seated in economy and cruising at altitude, you will be offered tea