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Last month Stoker brought you the press pack camping on the White House lawn as The Donald demolished the east wing of The White House.  This month; a few local journalists, more demolition, smaller scale .   To North Norfolk (again) where a little local difficulty is starting to blow up into a cause celebre.  Norfolk is flat and windy and when the wind is in the east, cold and wet into the bargain.  That means, if you are waiting for a bus to come along….;  but no, let us

I read with interest Stoker’s piece in last month's Only Connect - Mr Trump Leaves Town. As always, Stoker’s article was well informed, thought-provoking and amusing.  But I fear that his attempt to airbrush the extent of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Mayoral elections in New York as “not quite so overwhelming for Mamdani as the BBC might have you believe” will fool no one.  With the Democrats’ vote split between Mamdani and former Democrat Governor, Andrew Cuomo, backed b

There are currently a whole host of things to write about. I considered a number of them for my contribution to this month’s Only Connect. Should I write about the worrying rise of anti-Semitism; the attempts by the Labour government to bring in a blasphemy law by the backdoor with their committee discussing a definition of Islamophobia; David Lammy’s proposals to do away with jury trials for any offence for which the maximum jail time is less than three years; the concomitan

The Danes have led the way, as so often these days. From 1 January, 2026 the national postal service, PostNord, will stop collecting and delivering letters. Their red post boxes have been disappearing fast, reflecting the 90% decline in the number of letters posted over the past twenty-five years. I thought about this as I fought to get ten Christmas cards destined for abroad into a British post box late last Sunday night. I hope the postie managed to catch the avalanche on o

The far northeast corner of Bangladesh pokes an uninspiring finger into India’s West Bengal. The landscape differs little from the rest of the country: a carpet of rice fields, more rice fields, scattered settlements and bamboo clumps. Flat as a paratha. The patchy tarmac road north of Panchagarh got progressively worse and eventually I stopped my Land Rover and gazed around me. I was hoping to see the the Himalayan foothills, less than 100 km away, yet even on a clear day co

 My first memory, very clear, is of me cosy in my pram, being pushed along by Opa, my loving German grandfather. We’re passing the pub on the corner near home; up to the right is Harp Hill, round the corner the newsagents, a little further on the council estate known as Waddon, something of a no-go area for my resolutely middle-class parents. Just one thing is odd: the point of view is a few yards away, outside the pram and about eight feet up in the air.

My mother-in-law, Jane, will be ninety-nine years old in February. Her first forty-five years – working in the UK's Land Army during World War 2, engaged at seventeen to a man killed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, escaping a first marriage in Tanganyika to find a second husband in Kenya, widowed at thirty with an eighteen-month old daughter (my wife), rebuilding a life in England with almost no money, married for a third time to a man eight years younger than her – were

"Excuse me, Sir" asked the controller of the baggage scanner at the airport as he viewed a large mass of something opaque, "What are you carrying in your luggage?" "Soil", I replied.  "What are you doing in Rwanda?" "I am the dendrologist for Victory." That tends to be a conversation stopper so he shrugged and went back to his screen. In fact, I had tree seedlings in bags of soil in my suitcase for reasons which I shall explain...

The culture of swearing has changed radically within my lifetime. I was just 21, with a fairly humble job in theatre, when I found myself guarding the door against a mob of marauding paparazzi. They were intent on getting at Kenneth Tynan, the theatre critic, who had just uttered the F-word on television for the first time in history. These days, while a new puritanism seems to be affecting young people’s actual behaviour, their speech is peppered with the F-word even without

If you were living in a country on a temporary basis, would you expect to be able to vote in their elections? I am pretty sure it is not a question many people have thought to ask themselves. They would have thought the answer was self-evident.  Nor are they likely to have considered the flipside of the coin. How many foreigners who are not UK citizens, many  living in our country on temporary visas, are entitled to vote both in our local and our national elections? Rather la