Life
The Airbnb guest from hell
‘Is there a secret passageway behind that door?’ said the weirdly difficult Kiwi as she eyed a door marked ‘private’…
Bridget Phillipson’s perfect storm for schools
In its manifesto, Labour pledged to recruit 6,500 new teachers and the Education Secretary reiterated this a few days after…
2698: Au pairs – solution
The seven unclued pairs are BENSON/HEDGES, COUNTRY/WESTERN, TIME/TIDE, MUSCAT/OMAN, TWEEDLEDUM/TWEEDLEDEE, DUMFRIES/GALLOWAY and BITS/BOBS. First prize Roland Rance, London E17 Runners-up…
2701: Mix and Match
Solvers may find it helpful to Mix and Match the 12 unclued entries. Across 12 Wild West films rate so…
The gobsmacking brilliance of baked Alaska
I have never seen a baked Alaska in the wild. Have you? I knew what they looked like, of course,…
Aussie life
I happened to be in London when the UK’s Supreme Court confirmed what many people have long suspected about women…
Language
Everyone who has ever worked in an election campaign knows what a ‘corflute’ is. We have all seen them even…
Northern Europe doesn’t get salads: Claro reviewed
Claro is at 12 Waterloo Place, St James’s, and, when I tried to find out what it used to be…
Dear Mary: Must I take my mother-in-law’s hideous cast-offs?
Q. My soon-to-be mother-in-law has started off-loading large amounts of her expensive but hideous cast-off clothes on to me. I…
The day the King came to Ravenna
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna ‘Fortune’s a right whore: If she give aught, she deals it in small parcels,/ That she may…
Help! I’m turning into Basil Fawlty
Basil Fawlty ended up beating his car with a tree branch after doing B&B for years, and I am very…
Is an Epsom renaissance on the way?
Through 30 years of living within walking distance of the Derby course I was ever hopeful of seeing Epsom’s status…
A football regulator would be an own goal
It’s that time of the year again in football when the Championship sweeps all before it: it’s full of joy…
Is the end of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ in sight?
Could the end of non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) be in sight? As the head of the Free Speech Union, I’ve…




























