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We were lucky. The ambulance came in half an hour. By then my teenage son Edward was unconscious. He’d had a headache the day before, but by the evening he seemed to be getting better – sitting on the sofa, watching telly, annoying his little sister. We’d been through the meningitis checklist on the NHS
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Today Angela Merkel will meet David Cameron in Downing Street. She will tell him what she can do – and what she cannot do – to help keep Britain in the EU. Yet she might like to begin by telling him what she plans to do to keep her own people behind the EU project, for
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Driving around Bali, the first thing I noticed was the big wicker baskets by the roadside. Inside each basket was a cockerel. I asked my friend Wayan why these birds were there. ‘They put them by the road to make them used to people,’ he told me. ‘Then they won’t be scared when it’s time
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‘Jesus is the light of the world,’ reads the sign outside Blackpool’s Central Methodist Church, but all along the promenade the lights are going out. I’d returned to my favourite seaside resort to catch the end of the Illuminations, an annual attraction that brings several million visitors here every year. Since 1879, this vast canopy
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In the old Death Strip between East and West Berlin, which runs through the centre of the city, there is a graveyard full of German war heroes and a few war criminals too. From the Red Baron to Reinhard Heydrich, the best and worst of the German military are buried here. There’s also a mass
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As I grew up half German in England in the 1970s, my German heritage was confined to the few curios my grandmother had brought here after the war: a signet ring, a cigarette case, a scrapbook with some missing pages…. She’d changed her name, she’d changed my father’s name, the nation she came from lay
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Back in the last century, when people still watched television rather than computers, I fulfilled the lifetime ambition of every comedy nerd when I finally got to meet David Croft and Jimmy Perry. Whoever said ‘don’t meet your heroes’ clearly never met any sitcom writers. I was working on a BBC series about the history
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My grandfather was born in a huge white house on the Baltic coast of eastern Germany, and ever since I was a child I’ve been fascinated by this enigmatic tideless sea. I’ve travelled along its southern shore, from Germany to Estonia, but I’d always wanted to sail across it, and last month, at last, I
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‘Some day we shall no longer need pictures: we shall just be happy.’ — Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, 1966 Who says Germans have no sense of humour? OK, so their writers tend to be a pretty gloomy bunch — but like loads of other German artists, from Otto Dix to Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke’s
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Driving up the west coast, from Bridge-town to Speightstown, you soon see why people around here call this the Platinum Coast. It’s not just the colour of the coral sand — it’s the colour of the foreign money. These seafront lots sell for millions, prices few Bajans can afford. Yet once you head inland you
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When I finally reached the hospital, my grandma had already lost consciousness. As soon as I saw her, I could tell she wouldn’t wake up again. We all stood around and waited, and hoped it wouldn’t take too long. I sat on the bed and held her hand. Thankfully, it only took an hour or
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It’s official: Europe’s least visited country is unloved little Liechtenstein. Last year, a mere 60,000 tourists travelled to this absurd Alpine principality. For discerning Spectator readers, this is great news. Liechtenstein is charming, its absurdities are enchanting, and it boasts one of the most stylish (and least crowded) modern art museums in Europe. Nothing spoils
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Gaily into Ruislip Gardens runs the red electric train… Near the end of the Metropolitan Line, where London dwindles into woods and meadows, stands a Tudor manor house, built within the moat of a motte-and-bailey castle. Now a quaint museum, charting the history of the farms that once surrounded it, this modest landmark shares its
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Strange things happen to Werner Herzog — almost as strange as the things that happen in his haunting, hypnotic films. In 1971, while making a movie in Peru, he was bumped off a flight that subsequently crashed into the jungle. Years later, he made a moving film about that disaster’s sole survivor. In 2006, while
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In 2001 I wrote a book called The Comedy Store (still available in some good bookshops – and quite a lot of bad ones) about the London comedy club that kick-started modern British comedy. The book was a bit of a mixed bag, but the best bits were where I shut up and let these
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When Queen Victoria came here for her summer holidays, Lucerne was already a bustling tourist destination. Today it’s just as popular. It’s easy to see why. When you emerge from the busy train station (Lucerne is far too civilised to have an airport), Switzerland’s loveliest lake lies before you, framed by a ring of mountains.
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In a one-horse town called Hestrud, on the Franco-Belgian border, there’s a monument which encapsulates Europe’s enduring fascination with Napoleon. The story carved upon this plinth is more like poetry than reportage. As Napoleon passed through here, on his way to Waterloo, he struck up a conversation with a bold little boy called Cyprien Joseph
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Salzburg is so ridiculously pretty, it’s sometimes hard to take it seriously. Standing on the ramparts of its knights-in-armour castle, surrounded by snowcapped mountains, admiring the delicate cluster of domes and spires and turrets below, you can’t help thinking, ‘Is this for real?’ Well, yes and no. Salzburg is absurdly beautiful — the baroque architecture, the
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I watched the new DVD of Gregory’s Girl on the train from London up to Edinburgh. I hadn’t seen Bill Forsyth’s school-yard comedy in more than 30 years. Incredibly, it hasn’t dated in the slightest. When I saw it in the cinema, in 1981, as an acne-ridden adolescent, this tender romance was a revelation —
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It really is rotten luck, and also cruelly ironic. Just as Glasgow was done debating how best to demolish its hideous Red Road flats, its most beautiful building, Glasgow School of Art, goes up in smoke. No one hurt, apparently, which is a relief, but an awful lot of artwork lost, a unique archive and
