Swimming
Is it ever acceptable to ask to swim in a friend’s pool?
I’ve always loved English swimming pools. I can’t help it – I am a pool-fancier. The lumpy feel of the…
Low life
I’m house-sitting for the foreign correspondent while he attends the funeral of his beloved father-in-law Toto, the last of the…
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Listening to Trees A Crowd, a podcast exploring the ‘56(ish) native trees of the British Isles’, solved one of childhood’s…
Letters
Deterring crime Sir: Rod Liddle is right to highlight the politicisation of the police as a source of their inadequacies,…
Letters
The closing of churches Sir: Stephen Hazell-Smith is quite right in writing that churches should re-open (Letters, 18 April), however…
How many people have swum the Channel?
Journey’s end Holidaymakers are being flown home after travel company Thomas Cook failed. The idea might have horrified the company’s…
Brace yourself for no deal
I AM up on the far north-west coast of Scotland, where the weather is changing every five minutes under vast skies…
Seeing Nelson in a new light
I picked up my grandson from his mother’s flat and noticed the change in him the second I clapped eyes…
A mix of myths
With ‘both arms stretched out like a starfish, her long hair floating like seaweed at the sides of her body’,…
Barometer
Service record The government is to form a design panel to improve motorway services stations. These have not always charmed…
Low life
My grandson and I had a lovely hour-long swim at the leisure centre. We had the learner pool to ourselves…
In praise of Dr Google
There’s something perversely satisfying in discovering that your children have inherited your vices. That’s why I was so quietly pleased…
Low life
In the Spar shop I overheard someone talking anxiously to the woman on the till about an approaching ‘hurricane’. I…
Must I sponsor your misery?
Every charitable donation now seems to come with a promise to suffer
