Who can afford to send Christmas cards any more?
At this time of year I’d usually be writing dozens of Christmas cards, with a Snowball to hand, heavy on…
Babycham is back!
Babycham, the drink you perhaps last sipped while tapping the ash from a black Sobranie as Sade played on the…
It may be too late to save trail hunting
There’s a grumble, often repeated among country folk, that ‘hunting people got hunting banned’. What they mean (I think) is…
Love it or loathe it, ragwort is winning
White, lacy cow parsley frothing along the roadside is a familiar sight during the British summer. But 2024 is the…
Gins in tins – the Yummy Mummy’s ruin
I’m writing this in my car, laptop on knees and a delicious can of Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla gin and…
What do we mean when we talk of ‘home’?
Though deeply attached to her ‘squat, odd-looking house’ near Uffington, Clover Stroud comes to realise that home is as much about bonds between people as a particular place
How the Jilly Cooper Book Club turned toxic
The Jilly Cooper Book Club was set up about a decade ago by two friends who’d had enough of book…
The sad death of the pony ride
Pony rides were once a staple of every village, church and primary-school fête. A brusque, horsey mother would swing you…
Never the doctor, always the nurse: the fate of women in post-war Britain
For decades, undereducated girls were thwarted before they even started in the workplace, living in the slipstream of men and drip-fed with a sense of their own uselessness
The mystery behind elderflower
There’s an old saying that English summertime begins when the frothy heads of elderflowers appear in hedgerows – and ends…
