Dogs
Good dogs v. lame jokes
Black Widow is the latest Marvel film and although I’d sworn off these films a while ago, due to sheer…
My life as a dogsbody
Even a small dog can be quite high maintenance. No, I’m not talking about Mali, our one-year-old cavapoochon, but Bertie,…
Dear Mary
Q. We have old friends who live in the northern hinterlands and have a property in Provence where they normally…
Real life
Watching a woman driving a dog past my house like a carthorse is just another ‘new normal’ of lockdown. This…
Spacs and the City: if London won’t, Amsterdam will
This column generally takes a sceptical view of financial novelties and gimmicks. So my antennae have twitched in recent days…
A quick fix
How Boris and Carrie can bring Dilyn to heel
Diary
Santa Monica is a soothing place to be locked down. I moved here from New York for four months in…
Diary
Spring in Somerset — again. If someone had told me last February that I’d spend seven of the next 12…
Diary
We weren’t long into Bruce Castor’s opening speech defending Donald Trump in his impeachment trial before we knew it was…
Presidential dogs
From the moment Donald Trump’s presidency began, he was lacking something. But Joe Biden is about to make up for…
Diary
Real men are not supposed to confess to feeling fear. But I am frightened, second time round, about the plague.…
A dog is not just for lockdown
The Dogs Trust charity received 114 calls on 27 and 28 December from people wanting to offload their puppies. No,…
Single girl’s notebook
What this government needs is a good dose of the London mob, which at its height in the 18th century…
The Spectator’s Notes
Last week, I wrote about ‘Frost & Lewis’ (David and Oliver), leaders of our country’s team at the Brexit negotiations,…
Dog pounds
The hidden costs of the lockdown puppy boom
The puppy has won
Will the huge surge in demand for puppies and kittens during lockdown lead to a lot of abandoned pets when…
Doggie style
This week I’d like to point you in the direction of the British Film Institute and its free online archive…
Stinky Malinky is growing on me
Since the beginning of the lockdown, Caroline has been congratulating herself for having bought a puppy ‘just in time’. She…
Quarantine with our new puppy will send me barking
When the news leaked at the weekend that the government was considering telling those aged 70 and over to self-quarantine…
Pet peeve
Let animals be animals
I’m at risk of becoming a cat person
Just before Christmas our cat Runty died and I wasn’t in any rush to find a replacement. I like cats…
Can a church blessing tame my unruly dog?
The picture on the front of the Animal Blessing Service programme featured a dog, a cat, a rabbit, a goldfish,…
Petronella Wyatt: I’ve been turned into a curiosity – and Boris is to blame
I am beginning to feel like a sort of fairground curiosity: one of those pickled things in jars that Victorians…
How many dogs are there in Britain?
Model hobbies Asked what he did to relax, Boris Johnson claimed that he liked to make model buses. Some others…
The barking world of ‘doggo lingo’
Doggy sounds childish. ‘How much is that doggie in the window?’ asks the popular song. (The song title used the…
