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And so the order went out from the editorial suite on the 51st level: “No more Trump”.  And forty floors below, Stoker pulled up his green eyeshade, moodily pulled his half-written essay on Donald out of the battered Remington, and flung it at the waste paper basket, missing, as always, by a yard. Lolling back in the battered wooden chair which is standard issue to Only Connect scribblers, he surveyed the narrow view, blocked as it was by the soaring tower of Copper House, gl

The family call it “The Birth Certificate”. It is a single page torn out of a red notebook, one of many kept by their ancestor, a doctor in Southsea, England. In them he used to scribble notes about events – April/Engaged…Aug/Married (these in 1885) or any matter which puzzled, amused or inspired him – Geo IV spent his wedding night drunk across the grate. Why? Because he was also trying to earn some money by writing. A doctor in Victorian times had to canvass for patients an

A US President accused of sexual misconduct with an underage girl. In order to distract attention, the President orders a massive aerial bombing attack on a distant foreign country without prior consent from his allies. Of course this preposterous fiction could never happen in real life, but it was exactly this scenario which played out in the film Wag the Dog...

Chocolate has never been more expensive to buy in the UK. Readers from further afield will also notice steep rises in the price of their favourite confectionery. The increases are bigger than you imagine because chocolate manufacturers are fond of shrinkflation. That 200g bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk, the UK’s favourite, is now 180g. The sharp rise in the cost of chocolate has caught the attention of the press, but for reasons that are less to do with the fabled “cost of living

On the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, I crossed the Arctic Circle heading north.  I wasn’t aiming for Greenland, hoping to stake my claim before Trump got there; I was chasing the receding polar night line.  We never quite caught up with it; we arrived at Norway’s northernmost point three days late.  North Cape had daylight. But the interval between nominal sunrise and nominal sunset was supposedly an hour and a half; it was hard to tell...

Several readers have told me they enjoyed the innocence in the lines from my journal of boyhood in smalltown Cheltenham. So here is another extract as preface to an event in Lima: Friday, January 6th 1956 I went to town dressed as a girl, because I didn't want to wear my school uniform. Valerie lent me her scarf to wear on my head, and said I looked like a girl. That's how the idea came. We met Rosina (my sister) and Ian (her boyfriend) in the Promenade, and he did not reco

Disillusioned with politics? Exasperated by the tedious political mudslinging? Unsure about how to vote next time? You are not alone.   Half the voters who backed Labour at the last general election have deserted the party, and the Tories would limp home with a mere 14 seats if a general election were called, according to separate polls disclosed towards the end of 2025...

I have seen many mammals in Africa from aarvarks to zorillas but the ones that interest me the most are the ones I’ve never (or hardly ever) seen.  Some of the ‘Big Five’ bore me, particularly cheetahs and lions. Cheetahs should not be on the list: they are small (around 50kg), are killed by big cats and are, apart from their speed, utterly defenceless and harmless. When surrounded, you can catch them by the tail and all they do is try and pull away from you. But they are gre

Whenever I knock on doors in the UK constituency of Frome and East Somerset (FES) to find out how the occupants are likely to vote in an upcoming election, I have my phone in my hand, ready to check that I am indeed listening to the views of, say, Linda Crabtree of 56 Tyning Road, Radstock and not those of her neighbours.* The phone app is called MiniVan. On it are the names and addresses of those on the electoral register, plus questions which aim to find out the person’s po

Are you imagining a picturesque, snow-covered, winter landscape versus the current reality of a soggy, brown and grey, English rural scene, complete with mud and water running off fields into roads and gardens? The latter may, sadly, be the state of the English countryside in February 2026, but it is not of course what the Government and its local councillors are at all concerned about at the moment.  No, what they are apparently concerned about is the fact that our rural are