Low life
In the Foreign Legion’s Museum of Memory at Aubagne, near Marseilles, I examined the kit, weapons and uniforms from the…
Spring fever in Cologne
I chased the shadow of the New Year’s Eve sex attacks through the city’s carnival
Low life
The hotel reception was lit by three gloomy low-wattage light bulbs. It should have been six but the management was…
Low life
Denis was my guide to and from the new out-of-town Lidl superstore at Salernes in Provence. I drove. The road…
Tricks of the trade
This book, the blurb warns us, was written by ‘an established voice in popular psychology, with a regular column on…
Low life
Roy was a superb mechanic, a methodical master of his trade. For an hour I respectfully watched him work to…
Low life
Putting old or contaminated petrol in a car needn’t be catastrophic, but in the Golf’s case it was. With 37,000…
Low life
I was at home in Devon for the month of December. My sister was also there and her tyrannical, wildly…
Low life
The new year was two hours young. My boy and I were side by side on a row of three…
Low life
For me, last year started with an appalling whitey outside a pub after swallowing a second ecstasy tablet because I…
She was Ariadne to my Theseus
My contempt for vaping deepened as vaping contraptions became more ostentatious and people started hanging them from lanyards around their…
Low life
My favourite YouTube video clip this week shows a chap sitting at a desk typing. All you can see of…
The GP charged around to my side of the table and roved her hand all over my pubic area
On Friday morning I was peeing razor blades so I rang up the doctor and was given an appointment after…
Low life
The car: a ’06 rosso red Seat Ibiza 1.9 TDI Sport, bought three weeks ago from a man who had…
Low life
My sister has a new man in her life: Henry, 60. He lives in a gay hotel. Or rather, it…
Low life
She was dying for a mad night out, she said, so where was I going to take her? I know,…
Low life
The fag end of October. Dark evenings. My smelly old Barbour. Chopping and splitting wood. Uncanny stillnesses. Psychedelic maple trees.…
Curry and Modafinil with Winston Churchill
The bar at the Special Forces club has the marvellous rule for newcomers that they should talk to the person…
Why Jesus sometimes plays a very long game
We closed the last page of a gruesome, thrilling picture book called The Day Louis Got Eaten and said our…
Happiness is a chainsaw and a maul in the rain and the mud
It rained all day long last Friday in Provence, and it rained all night, and on Saturday morning it was…
Low life
Every morning for the past two years, on waking, I’ve reached out for the white plastic tub on the bedside…
Low life
I was looking after Oscar, my five-and-a-half-year-old grandson, for the day. We’d played football in the garden, then we’d come…
Low life
The staples of my daily alcohol consumption on the cruise were champagne, gin, red wine and Polish vodka. One morning…
Low life
There is something repulsive about the sea, especially when seen from the altitude of the upper decks of a monstrous…
Low life
Last Saturday afternoon, in Venice, 31 Spectator readers, plus Martin Vander Weyer, the great Taki and I came aboard the…
