Today was National Apple Day in the UK, and at the Bath Farmers’ Market yesterday the enterprising folk put on an enormous display of 249 varieties. Campaigners complain that supermarkets stock just a few, and this means that a good many varieties are dying out. Those apples that are surviving […]

…that I nervously walked down a narrow street called Shoe Lane, in an improbably wide-shouldered Hugo Boss suit, between the Fleet Street offices of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express, past the loading bays with trucks depositing huge rolls of newsprint to their then-hungry print shops at the rear. I was headed for […]

Times columnist Simon Barnes has endorsed those of us who wear our hunter-gatherer-ness on our sleeves.
In a short essay on this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, Barnes spoke of the fans he has been accompanying on assignment while covering the Rugby World Cup in France:-
The rest are here in pursuit of the greater goal […]

“It ain’t over till it’s over,” Yogi Berra famously used to say. If you’re an English rugby fan, there can be no truer words to reflect your recent experience. I normally don’t follow rugby very closely, for various family reasons, but have a habit of walking in to watch the last […]

When James Bond arrives at his Istanbul hotel in From Russia With Love, he finds that the room is bugged (naturally), is moved to the bridal suite, and orders breakfast: green figs, yoghurt and coffee — very black — for nine o’clock delivery.
As this has been the week of social proof, I’d like to pose […]