My afternoon with the French Foreign Legion
In the Foreign Legion’s Museum of Memory at Aubagne, near Marseilles, I examined the kit, weapons and uniforms from the…
‘Are you worried about being sexually assaulted?’: my night in Cologne
I chased the shadow of the New Year’s Eve sex attacks through the city’s carnival
Exit, pursued by drunk polar bear
The hotel reception was lit by three gloomy low-wattage light bulbs. It should have been six but the management was…
Even a Cambridge-educated spook couldn't make me believe in ghosts
Denis was my guide to and from the new out-of-town Lidl superstore at Salernes in Provence. I drove. The road…
How to avoid being taken for a ride
This book, the blurb warns us, was written by ‘an established voice in popular psychology, with a regular column on…
So the Queen's a Satanist cannibal? I’d still swear allegiance
Roy was a superb mechanic, a methodical master of his trade. For an hour I respectfully watched him work to…
The secret life of Sir John Major
Putting old or contaminated petrol in a car needn’t be catastrophic, but in the Golf’s case it was. With 37,000…
My six-year-old grandson got Grand Theft Auto, certificate 18, for Christmas
I was at home in Devon for the month of December. My sister was also there and her tyrannical, wildly…
The palpable tragedy of New Year’s Eve in A&E
The new year was two hours young. My boy and I were side by side on a row of three…
My 2015 pharmacopoeia: ecstasy, decapepyl, abiraterone, tamsulosin, cocaine...
For me, last year started with an appalling whitey outside a pub after swallowing a second ecstasy tablet because I…
She was Ariadne to my Theseus
My contempt for vaping deepened as vaping contraptions became more ostentatious and people started hanging them from lanyards around their…
A paean to a typewriter
My favourite YouTube video clip this week shows a chap sitting at a desk typing. All you can see of…
The GP charged around to my side of the table and roved her hand all over my pubic area
On Friday morning I was peeing razor blades so I rang up the doctor and was given an appointment after…
All hail to the Stig’s mum’s Seat Ibiza TDI Sport
The car: a ’06 rosso red Seat Ibiza 1.9 TDI Sport, bought three weeks ago from a man who had…
‘I’m a racist. My sister’s a racist. We’re all racists here’
My sister has a new man in her life: Henry, 60. He lives in a gay hotel. Or rather, it…
What it takes to make Exmouth rock out
She was dying for a mad night out, she said, so where was I going to take her? I know,…
Autumn is the season of magic mushrooms and psychedelic maple trees
The fag end of October. Dark evenings. My smelly old Barbour. Chopping and splitting wood. Uncanny stillnesses. Psychedelic maple trees.…
Curry and Modafinil with Winston Churchill
The bar at the Special Forces club has the marvellous rule for newcomers that they should talk to the person…
Jesus sometimes plays a very long game
We closed the last page of a gruesome, thrilling picture book called The Day Louis Got Eaten and said our…
Happiness is a chainsaw and a maul in the rain and the mud
It rained all day long last Friday in Provence, and it rained all night, and on Saturday morning it was…
Farewell, white ovoid exhaustion-inducing tablets; hello, West Ham’s religious revival
Every morning for the past two years, on waking, I’ve reached out for the white plastic tub on the bedside…
Follow my grandsons on the trail of the last bear in England
I was looking after Oscar, my five-and-a-half-year-old grandson, for the day. We’d played football in the garden, then we’d come…
Modafinil, ladies and gentlemen. Recommended.
The staples of my daily alcohol consumption on the cruise were champagne, gin, red wine and Polish vodka. One morning…
The only one who set a bad example on the high seas was Taki
There is something repulsive about the sea, especially when seen from the altitude of the upper decks of a monstrous…
Taki's table talk and my fears about the Spectator cruise
Last Saturday afternoon, in Venice, 31 Spectator readers, plus Martin Vander Weyer, the great Taki and I came aboard the…
