John Sturgis

We have all become only too used to the surging cost of heating our homes, filling up our cars or doing the weekly shop. But there’s one price increase that hurts me more than all of these combined: the cost of a bottle of wine in a restaurant. Just five years ago, it was rare to find a wine list without

A Real Pain was one of my favourite films of recent years, a tragicomic exploration of family, history, place and identity featuring two Americans in Poland – specifically in Warsaw and Lublin.  My wife was also quite smitten – with Lublin as much as the film – and on the back of this began planning a weekend in the eastern Polish city. I was a little wary of

It was the longest pub crawl of my life – visiting numerous boozers across 250 miles over ten days – in homage to one of Britain’s most infamous drinkers, Dylan Thomas. I’m not, I must qualify, a Thomas obsessive, as this enterprise might suggest. If exposed to Thomas at length, I find myself recalling Private Eye’s 1980s characterisation of Neil Kinnock: ‘The Welsh windbag.’ Although, in fairness, even Thomas himself described his own verse as ‘a

I first wore a beret for a fancy dress competition at my infant school summer fete in June 1975. My mother had entered me in the ‘topical’ category and tapped into the media furore around the nationwide referendum a week earlier over whether or not the UK should join what would become the EU – an

The mood music around pubs lately has felt as if it were being played by the band on RMS Titanic while the industry goes down with the loss of all hands. Even before the body blow of the pandemic, people were generally drinking less, and more of what they did drink was from supermarkets. Then the

It’s relatively common, I find, when opening a newly purchased second-hand book for the first time, for something to fall from its pages. Most likely this will be a branded bookmark or printed stocklisting paper from the dealer who sold it. But it’s not unusual to find something more interesting, something belonging to the book’s

When is a journey not a journey? The answer to this pseudo-Zen riddle, at least according to Sadiq Khan’s Transport for London, is: when the journey is one that the passenger intends to make but is unable to complete. Have I lost you? Allow me to explain. Recently I experienced yet again one of the regular

Neil Young once saved my life. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.  This was at an outdoor show in Finsbury Park in July 1993. I had pushed and squeezed my way almost to the front of a large crowd shortly after being passed something of dubious provenance to smoke. One moment everything was

They already had four children, four cats, four dogs, a number of horses and a pet pig called Philip. But for Alan and Judith Kilshaw, this wasn’t enough. When IVF failed, they decided to try to adopt another child. What happened next would lead to them being pursued by the FBI, as well as a

It was conceived as a ‘people’s palace’ – and, as it turns 150 this week, Alexandra Palace continues to fulfil this brief admirably. There is something for everyone, and it’s not too sniffy about who ‘everyone’ describes. Hence the annual mayhem around the winter darts tournament, when everywhere between Muswell Hill and Wood Green is

It is the evening of Monday 23 September 1985. A band called the June Brides are playing a free gig in the bar of Manchester Polytechnic’s Students Union, the Mandela Building (of course) on Oxford Road. I find myself among the audience of freshers’ week first-year undergraduates. I am 18, a small-town boy who’s been

It is ten years since Sepp Blatter finally lost control of football’s world governing body, Fifa. But despite his retirement and advanced years – he has just celebrated his 89th birthday – Blatter has not been able to bow out quietly. In a few days, on Tuesday, Blatter will be in court, in Basel, in

Walking into this crowded and clattering restaurant for the first time in more than 30 years, two things strike me almost immediately: 1) it seems to be largely unchanged and 2) the prices have scarcely risen. I can’t claim to have tried every wine list in Soho, but I can tell you with certainty that

The Cherry Tree on Southgate Green began life as a coaching inn on one of the historic routes from London to York and beyond. It has been trading since 1695, when what are now the north London suburbs were open fields. But the other evening, the pub – my local – rang last orders for

He’s the best-known Briton ever to have boldly gone into space: the first to board the International Space Station, the first to carry out a space walk. Major Tim Peake even ran a marathon while in orbit. So why do I wince every time I hear his name?  When I was growing up, shortly after the

Entering the New Inn in Llanddewi Brefi in Ceredigion is like stepping back in time. The only pub in the village (since the Foelallt Arms closed down four years ago), The New Inn seems to hail from the 1970s. Its till is a pull-out wooden drawer full of coins and notes. There’s a coal fire in

The suggestion that the Prince Charles cinema in London’s West End could be closed down was the least surprising news of the week. This sort of thing, fuelled by soaring property values, has been happening in Soho and its periphery for three decades now and shows no sign of relenting. The Prince Charles isn’t strictly

Shortly before midnight on the evening of Friday 24 January 1975, at Cologne Opera House on the banks of the Rhine, a wiry 29-year-old from Pennsylvania walked onto the stage in front of a crowd of 1,400 people and began to play the piano, alone. The 50th anniversary of what followed is being celebrated with

I awoke in the early afternoon of 31 December 1995 face down on the carpeted floor of a mansion house flat in Notting Hill with the worst hangover I have ever had.  It is customary when writing about hangovers to quote the best description of the condition – by Kingsley Amis: ‘A dusty thudding in his head made

For a spell in the late 1970s there were two pop groups which dominated the UK singles charts – both, coincidentally, vocal quartets from continental northern Europe. But while one, Abba, have since become a billion-pound industry with an apparently permanent hologram-shaped presence on the London concert scene, their then rivals for pop supremacy, Boney