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In his novel Coming up for Air (1939), George Orwell has his benighted protagonist, George Bowling, bite into a sausage, only to discover that it tastes of something else altogether: ‘…pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my
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In PR terms, it’s a such a well-worn trajectory, it has its own name. ‘Doing a Burberry’ is the term for when something once exclusive and favoured by those in-the-know is appropriated by the hoi polloi and its standing slips inexorably downwards. The Ivy — now a chain of naff provincial cafés — is a notable victim. Marbella, now ‘Marbs’ thanks to the cast of TOWIE is another. So is the name Samantha, once terribly Sloaney, now associated only with a
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He’s 12 next month, my eldest son, but he’s rejected the ‘movie night’ party I’ve suggested, and he doesn’t want any of his new friends from senior school to come for a sleepover. And I know why. Our television is a modest one, not the size of one of the screens flanking the main stage
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Another day, another report on how many children have had to leave their private schools, thanks to Labour’s VAT raid on fees. This particular survey, by wealth management firm, Saltus, found that almost one in ten parents have had to take their children out of the independent sector altogether while 65 per cent of those questioned admitted to
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Reports that Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie have been banned from the Royal Ascot carriage procession raise an important question: what is the optimum fighting weight of the Royal Family? For years now, we’ve been hearing about King Charles’s plans for a ‘slimmed down’ monarchy. Prince William, too, has declared that ‘change is on my agenda’ — which presumably means fewer floppy hats and chests stuck
It was the sort of elaborate birthday surprise that Andrew — practical joker and fond of a fart gag — might have arranged to prank a friend. Six unmarked police cars roaring up to the farmhouse where he had been living on the Sandringham estate at the unseemly hour of 8 a.m yesterday. Only these rozzers were
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The nicest thing anyone has said to me recently is: ‘But surely you’re far too young to remember cassettes?’ Sadly, I had to break it to my new neighbour that, as a child of the 1980s and a 1990s teen, I’m not – which is why I’m bemused to learn that tapes are the latest piece
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It feels like the 57th day of January. Last week the coldest temperature of the winter so far (-12.5°C) was recorded about 20 miles west of my house. And according to every newspaper and social media feed I have scanned since new year, I should be purging my body of toxins by eating ‘plant-based meals’, abstaining
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‘Dearly beloved friends and family, well, what a year it’s been! Where to start?! The big event for us – aside from nurturing our preternaturally gifted children and enjoying multiple holidays in exotic locations – was the “K” for Rupert in the King’s Birthday Honours list. Mingling with the Beckhams at Buck House after the
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Usually when my tweenage sons ask about relics from my 1990s adolescence – ‘What’s a landline?’ ‘What’s a phone book?’ – we’ll have a good laugh about these obsolete artefacts of the not-so-distant past. But last year when my ten-year-old asked about ‘Immigrant Song’, which he’d heard on the soundtrack to a Marvel movie, and
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For the past decade I’ve been in a toxic relationship. Sure, there were red flags – most of them on the dashboard – but it was love, or at least lust, on my part. My Land Rover seduced me with its size and strength, its rugged interior, how safe it made me feel when I
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How was National Standing on Doorsteps Week for you? For most, it’s a case of grabbing a picture two or even three days after la rentrée, when you remember that you’ve missed the annual obligation to record the progress of what Mumsnetters call the ‘DCs’ (darling children). Assemble them by the front door, roar at
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What do tech bros and pushy parents have in common? They’re both fond of citing Samuel Beckett’s most famous quote: ‘Fail again. Fail better.’ For parents, the line is invariably deployed when their ‘gifted’ child has underwhelmed at a crucial juncture. Let’s park the inconvenient fact that Beckett’s line has nothing to do with self-help.
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Rolling Stone magazine once quipped that grunge was what happened when the children of divorce got guitars in their hands. If you take this theory and tweak it, then one can reasonably conclude that Oasis is what happens when children who grow up in a house devoid of books decide to form a band. The
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‘Are you going to Glasto?’ Just the name – in that smug, shortened form – is enough to set my left eyelid twitching, the way it does when I read emails from people who still include pronouns in their signature. ‘Glasto’, trailing the self-satisfied whiff of BBC executives high-tailing it from Hampstead on a taxpayer-funded
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‘Same old boring Sunday morning, old men out, washing their cars.’ So begins the punk anthem ‘The Sound of the Suburbs’ by the Members. There are plenty of cars being washed (and waxed) on my road on any Sunday morning and the strimmers are buzzing, despite this being peak breeding season for insects. But here’s
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‘They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man… the greatest decade in the history of mankind is over,’ laments Danny the Dealer of the 1960s at the end of Withnail and I. These days, given the apparently insatiable appetite for all things 1990s, you could be forgiven for assuming that they’ve pinched that title. Nineties fashion
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Let’s cherchez un violon petit! Skiing is now too pricey for the middle classes. According to a recent flash poll by the Telegraph’s ski section, 70 per cent of readers now think skiing holidays are unaffordable. For the bourgeoisie, skiing – along with many of the other trappings they used to take for granted, such
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It wasn’t until I received a notification from the Monzo app that I realised I’d spent nearly £10 on two coffees. This wasn’t in the Wolseley or even within the M25, but in Two Magpies, a café in Holt, our local market town in Norfolk – for two regular lattes (admittedly with an extra shot,
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Even if you haven’t seen Adolescence, currently the most-watched show on Netflix, you’ll doubtless be aware – or think you’re aware – of its central themes: knife crime, social media, the manosphere and its pernicious influence on teenage boys. In other words, ‘the Andrew Tate shite’, as the show’s (female) detective sergeant sighs at one point.
