We (the English that is) share our patron saint’s day with the Catalans. On Sant Jordi’s day Barcelona fills up with bookstalls and flower sellers. The men give their women flowers and the women their men books. I lived in Barcelona a few years ago and found the whole thing charming but also a bit sexist.
I think I might be a bad parent; whenever my wife is out, I plonk our two-year-old daughter in front of the television. The other day we watched a rainbow nation of children marching around the British countryside singing ‘Let’s make sure we recycle every day’, and I realised that something has changed in children’s
I’ve just received my latest energy bill and it appears that I’ve been living this last year in a draughty manor house rather than a three–bedroom ex-council flat. This winter, I’m going to have to choose between a warm flat and decent-quality booze. Of course it’s going to be the booze; I’ll just have to
It has become a commonplace fact, beloved of pub quizzes, that an Englishman, Christopher Merret, invented Champagne. There is even an element of truth to it: Merret gave a paper to the Royal Society in 1672 outlining how to make wine fizzy. But he wasn’t the first to induce bubbles in a bottle. In the
For 14 years only one man has cut my hair. Actually, that is not strictly true. Last year I went elsewhere and I felt like a husband visiting a prostitute for the first time. It made me realise how attached I’d become to my barber, Kyri, a Greek Cypriot with a shop in Kensal Rise.
Call me a terrible lightweight, but I’m a little wary of drinking cocktails when the sun is out. A summer drink should be like a good soak in the pool, but the sort of cocktails I love — martinis, manhattans etc — are all about a sharp injection of alcohol into the system, a sharp
