Tequila slammers all round!
‘Tequila, it makes me happy,/ Con Tequila it feels fine’ goes the student anthem by Terrorvision. It is midnight, somewhere…
The National Garden Scheme is the perfect antidote to Chelsea’s vanity
Shortly before the New Gardens Organiser at the National Garden Scheme (NGS) is due to arrive at our farmhouse in…
I’ll miss the unintended hilarity of the round robin
‘Dearly beloved friends and family, well, what a year it’s been! Where to start?! The big event for us –…
Bring back the album
Usually when my tweenage sons ask about relics from my 1990s adolescence – ‘What’s a landline?’ ‘What’s a phone book?’…
My toxic affair with my Land Rover
For the past decade I’ve been in a toxic relationship. Sure, there were red flags – most of them on…
Suburbanites vs the countryside
‘Same old boring Sunday morning, old men out, washing their cars.’ So begins the punk anthem ‘The Sound of the…
Beware the £5 coffee
It wasn’t until I received a notification from the Monzo app that I realised I’d spent nearly £10 on two…
Why is the NHS pushing pregnant women towards sterilisation?
It was a routine antenatal appointment. I’d done it twice before and knew the format. The obstetrician runs through the…
Smoking is sexy again
It’s a summer’s day in Suffolk, some time in 1992. My best friend Rebecca and I are both 14 and…
Who can afford to send Christmas cards any more?
At this time of year I’d usually be writing dozens of Christmas cards, with a Snowball to hand, heavy on…
Babycham is back!
Babycham, the drink you perhaps last sipped while tapping the ash from a black Sobranie as Sade played on the…
It may be too late to save trail hunting
There’s a grumble, often repeated among country folk, that ‘hunting people got hunting banned’. What they mean (I think) is…
Love it or loathe it, ragwort is winning
White, lacy cow parsley frothing along the roadside is a familiar sight during the British summer. But 2024 is the…
Gins in tins – the Yummy Mummy’s ruin
I’m writing this in my car, laptop on knees and a delicious can of Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla gin and…
What do we mean when we talk of ‘home’?
Though deeply attached to her ‘squat, odd-looking house’ near Uffington, Clover Stroud comes to realise that home is as much about bonds between people as a particular place
How the Jilly Cooper Book Club turned toxic
The Jilly Cooper Book Club was set up about a decade ago by two friends who’d had enough of book…
The sad death of the pony ride
Pony rides were once a staple of every village, church and primary-school fête. A brusque, horsey mother would swing you…
Drowning in the typing pool
For decades, undereducated girls were thwarted before they even started in the workplace, living in the slipstream of men and drip-fed with a sense of their own uselessness
Elderflower
There’s an old saying that English summertime begins when the frothy heads of elderflowers appear in hedgerows – and ends…
