Swimming
The art of breaststroke
I’m house-sitting for the foreign correspondent while he attends the funeral of his beloved father-in-law Toto, the last of the…
Floods you with fascinating facts: Trees A Crowd reviewed
Listening to Trees A Crowd, a podcast exploring the ‘56(ish) native trees of the British Isles’, solved one of childhood’s…
Letters: Police must focus on deterring crime, not responding to it
Deterring crime Sir: Rod Liddle is right to highlight the politicisation of the police as a source of their inadequacies,…
Letters: The joy of balconies
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…
Hot Milk’s heroine has snaky curls and a basilisk stare
With ‘both arms stretched out like a starfish, her long hair floating like seaweed at the sides of her body’,…
A censored hymn to motorway misery
Service record The government is to form a design panel to improve motorway services stations. These have not always charmed…
My grandson's getting into the rugby: 'Which one's West Ham?'
My grandson and I had a lovely hour-long swim at the leisure centre. We had the learner pool to ourselves…
In praise of cyberchondria
There’s something perversely satisfying in discovering that your children have inherited your vices. That’s why I was so quietly pleased…
Jeremy Clarke: Can't we even manage a proper hurricane?
In the Spar shop I overheard someone talking anxiously to the woman on the till about an approaching ‘hurricane’. I…
I’m sick of sponsoring you to suffer
Every charitable donation now seems to come with a promise to suffer
