Life
Aussie Life
Everyone wants to get high and have sex while saving money. So says P. J. O’Rourke, the political satirist who…
Peaty giant, Tuscan flower
The virus is in retreat, the lock-down is crumbling, the sherbet dispensaries will shortly reopen and there is a second…
Who watches the watchdog?
At the beginning of April, I became so frustrated by the supine coverage of the government’s response to the coronavirus…
Ventriloquising
‘What! No one told me,’ my husband shouted when I explained that the Hebdomadal Council at Oxford no longer existed…
Network failures
You can’t discuss racial inequality without using the N-word. And you can’t debate social justice without adding the C-word and…
The Battle for Britain
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Real life
‘Have you met the man who keeps his horses in this field?’ said one silver-haired lady to the other, as…
The turf
Royal Ascot it wasn’t: for the first time in her 68-year reign, thanks to Covid-19, the Queen was not there.…
Bridge
I’m not a great fan of online bridge but I must admit, lockdown has provided a real opportunity for players…
Dear Mary
Q. How can one politely stop predatory kissers? I am (or was) an affectionate and demonstrative person but I don’t…
Here comes the summer
In Competition No. 3154 you were invited to supply your own variations on the medieval round ‘Sumer is icumen in’.…
Solution to 2460: Sleaze
The word is TACK. In the order of the headwords in Chambers, except for the fifth, their meanings are indicated…
Low life
Chatting on the café terrace with my new friends Didier and Emile made me aware that certain political ideas, which…
High life
Gstaad I thought of Nietzsche while the mayhem and destruction of monuments was going on. Decadent bourgeois society was in…
Clutch fun
‘May the best scoring system win!’ is hardly a sentiment to stoke the passions. In the 2011 referendum, the alternative…
2463: Tongue twister
The unclued lights are of a kind and are entered in the grid in a thematically appropriate manner. Across 11…
Puzzle no. 610
White to play. Grischuk–Aronian, Clutch Chess 2020. Only one rook move draws here. Which one? Answers should be emailed to…
Aussie Life
90 Days in lockdown – a retrospective Day 1 – you configure your bathroom into a replica of your…
High life
Oh, to be in America, where cultural decay and self-destruction compete equally with hyper-feminist and anti-racist agendas. Gone with the…
Real life
Opting out of organ donation was one of the hardest things I’ve done in a while. I don’t mean the…
Dear Mary
Q. I know it is rude to ask, when invited to a dinner party, ‘who else is coming?’ I assumed,…
The joy of proving my wife wrong
Back in April, The Spectator ran a feature in which the partners of regular contributors wrote about what it was…
A wing – and a prayer
Drive-through restaurants were invented so Americans could spend more time in their cars. I don’t blame them. American cars are…
Gaslight
Gaslight has been a useful word meaning ‘to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own…
Speed talking
When I first heard Abba’s magnificent 1982 swansong ‘The Day Before You Came’, I’d never come across the Americanised use…
