Suggestions for a fun family day out this summer... By some distance the least impressive museum I have ever visited is the Tomato Museum on the island of Guernsey. I think I was about fourteen when we went, so you can imagine the impression a tomato-based attraction would have made on ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Brit
A nautical theme this week, as Brit selects pieces from a great movie soundtrack... Not only is Patrick O’Brian’s 'Aubrey-Maturin' series of books one of the great reading experiences available to mankind but it has also spawned a fine movie in Peter Weir's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. The ... Read More...
Weather determines mood and this has been a rare weekend of holiday heat, barbecues, paddling in rivers and British sporting dominance. And just as when in the bleak bowels of February we cannot imagine ever seeing summer again, cannot even remember the feel of the sun on a slightly burnt ... Read More...
At lunchtime on the day before the Sunday People published pictures of Charles Saatchi engaging in ‘a playful tiff’ with his wife, I was standing at a market stall outside his magnificent art gallery in Chelsea, slurping down oysters laced with Tabasco. They were horribly delicious. I ate half a ... Read More...
There was more to Henry VIII than head-chopping and monastery-bashing... Bloody Tudors everywhere at the moment. I've been reading Hilary Mantel, watching BBC Two’s Tudor season, and now I can’t get this song out of my head. ‘I’m 'Enery the Eighth I am’, Joe Brown claims in a tale about a ... Read More...
Some welcome June sunshine. We sat on a bench in the park with a cone each. Scoop of Walls vanilla and a flake, no fancy stuff, passing on a traditional British summer treat to the next generation. But the heat gave me yearnings for the Med or the Canaries and ... Read More...
Continuing our occasional series on shops and shopping, Brit takes us to a rather unusual 'garden centre'... The best shop in the Bristol area, and by extension the world, is Chief Trading Post, in Oldland Common. It is, I suppose, a Garden Centre; but Chief Trading Post is a ‘Garden Centre’ ... Read More...
Every morning Amazon helpfully confirms that my phone’s email function still works by trying to sell me something. As does The Ticket Factory. Also Premier Inn, Centre Parks and especially VistaPrint, whose labyrinthine Unsubscribe facility has several times defeated me. These ‘consensual’ marketing emails we are invited to call ‘bacn’, ... Read More...
What’s the earliest age it is possible to develop a phobia? I ask because my younger daughter E, who is seventeen months old, has taken to seeing spiders everywhere. She will be playing happily enough when, suddenly spying some bit of fluff or black smudge on the floor, she will ... Read More...
From the Dabbler archives, some rather odd pianists... The evidence would suggest that piano virtuosity and wild eccentricity go hand-in-hand. Here are three of the most troubled Greats (and this is not even to mention David Helfgott, made famous by the movie Shine, or Grigory Sokolov, who takes each piano apart ... Read More...
