Life
All four of my kids will learn to shoot
I spent Monday morning being taught how to use a shotgun at E.J. Churchill, a shooting ground in High Wycombe.…
High life
After the heat in Greece, the Alps are cool and green and very comfortable. My sensei Richard Amos is over…
Flavour of the month
In Competition No. 3013 you were invited to submit a poem in praise or dispraise of August. There was…
Dear Mary
Q. Our best friends own a house in Morocco which sleeps about ten. They rent it out but go two…
The Battle for Britain
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Bacteria
It’s like whipping cream. All of a sudden it goes stiff and you can turn the bowl upside down without…
to 2322: In memoriam
The event was THE GLORIOUS TWELFTH (1D/29) (12 August, opening day of the grouse-shooting season). Remaining unclued lights bring to…
Bridge
The 43rd World Bridge Championships held in Lyon has just ended after two intense weeks and hundreds of boards. The…
Hou dares wins
Hou Yifan, the leading female grandmaster, is beginning to place strain on Judit Polgar’s record as the best woman chess…
no. 472
White to play. This position is a variation from Hari-krishna-Studer, Biel 2017. Can you spot White’s winning thrust? Answers to…
2325: Hard task
Clockwise round the grid run six of a kind (one of three words and one three-word pair). Other unclued lights…
A perfect feast with Roger Allam
J Sheekey is one of Richard Caring’s older, and better, restaurants. Since he has dowsed the suburbs of London in…
High life
I was appalled. She had asked Lord John Somerset to ask me to join her, and I rose rather unsteadily…
Low life
I arrived for lunch a bit late and was led to the dining table. Our hostess disappeared back into the…
Real life
My friendly neighbourhood Lib Dems have put some campaign literature through my door. In a covering note, they intimate that…
Which way will Lord’s leap?
In the rarefied circles of the sporting establishment a decision will soon be made affecting not just the future of…
The turf
I guess his mother may have called him Patrick, or even, when he was in trouble, ‘Patrick Joseph’, but in…
Spare me the encomiums for John le Carré
In Absolute Friends, one of John le Carré’s lesser works, the central character explains his rebirth as a left-wing firebrand,…
Reprogramming
In Competition No. 3012 you were invited to change a letter in the title of a well-known play and submit…
Dear Mary
Q. I am in my seventies and my husband is in his nineties. The other night we had two couples…
Sixteen-hundreds
I was puzzled by the caption to a picture in the Times Literary Supplement. The picture showed a model of…
Wild life
Indian Ocean coast Like most men I wonder if I have been much good as a father, but one thing…
Philidor’s heir
There was a time when France was the dominant power in world chess. When Howard Staunton commenced his remarkable series…
no. 471
White to play. This position is a variation from Vachier-Lagrave–Nepomniachtchi, St Louis 2017. How can White make a decisive material…
2324: In the frame
Each of twenty-one clues comprises a definition part and a hidden consecutive jumble of the answer including one extra letter.…
