Life
Bridge
Somewhere between 1 and 3 a.m., I turn off the lights but I can’t turn off my whirring brain. Cards…
no. 478
White to play. This position is from the above game, Praggnanandhaa-Howell, chess.com Masters. What is the accurate move White needed…
Officially amazing
In Competition No. 3019 you were invited to submit a limerick describing a feat worthy of inclusion in Guinness World…
Not so much
‘Kiss me mucho,’ sang my husband with a revolting leer, ‘and we’ll soar. And we’ll dance the dance of love…
Real life
They are building the bonfire already. In the dip where winter flooding sometimes creates a small lake, the wood and…
Prodigy
Twelve-year-old Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa scored a sensational result in the recent Isle of Man Masters. At the age of ten years…
2331: Anagrams
Unclued lights suggest nine different words, each made up of the same five letters. These letters will appear in the…
Solution to 2328: Second coming
The suggested title is Brideshead Revisited, HEEDS/RABID (6A/42) being an anagram of BRIDESHEAD. The six characters, all members of the Flyte…
Dear Mary
Q. A well-known television mogul,whom I had met only once, came to dinner at my house. I was on good…
High life
I smell a rat when it comes to Harvey Weinstein. Let’s take it from the start. The telephone rang very…
The Battle for Britain
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Low life
Early on Friday morning I flew from the north of Iceland to Reykjavik, from Reykjavik to Heathrow, then I hopped…
Elle Decoration meets pub food
The Mandrake is a new ‘design hotel’ in London, which means it is for people who treat Elle Decoration magazine…
Why the England team is so unexciting
During a riveting session at the Cheltenham Literary Festival with sporting brainboxes Mike Brearley and Matthew Syed, discussion touched on…
I met Weinstein and, yes, I’d heard the rumours
According to an ex-employee of Harvey Weinstein’s, the movie producer once whispered something to himself that she found so disturbing…
The turf
The mission was simple: take a load of garden refuse to the council dump and be back in time to…
Battle for Britain
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Low life
The temperature gauge needle heeled hard over into the red. ‘Not again,’ I said to Oscar, sitting beside me on…
Tube
When George Eliot wrote ‘The tube-journey can never lend much to picture and narrative,’ she was not making an observant…
Wild life
Laikipia Ripping up the black cotton soil on the farm’s high savannah I get a sense of what it must…
Raising the threshold crappiness
I love anything open late at night. Never mind ‘the sigh of midnight trains in empty stations’; even mundane activities…
Get a life
In Competition No. 3018 you were invited to take your lead from Meik Wiking — CEO at the Happiness Research…
Dear Mary
Q. We have moved from London into a rural area where we are preparing for the first visit of a…
Real life
How reassuringly like old times it is, going to a God-forsaken retail park with Stefano. We mooch about the DIY…
Boris, the conviction politician
I’m writing this from the Conservative party conference where I can report that Boris Johnson, who has just wowed the…
