Other Men's Flowers

No 20 in a series of extracts from The Postcard Century . There have been two for every decade of the 20th century, but now I will start to...

Winnie-the-Pooh and Wind in the Willows aside, I never cared much for anthropomorphic children's stories, and I had heard only vaguely...

I had no idea, until I read a fascinating piece by Patricia Marx in the New Yorker, that one and a quarter billion dollars in kosher-certifi...

......or out of it, as the case may be. Passed a pleasant half-hour at the hustings earlier this month. Our local tennis club was transforme...

R H Brock, 1916 'How is it you're not at the Front, young man?' 'Cause there ain't no milk at that end, mum.' Durin...

All too seldom do we take the time to pause, to free ourselves briefly from the pressures of modern life and quietly meditate. Well may we a...

photo taken by Ken Prior over Schiehallion, Perthshire As Member No 8158 of the Cloud Appreciation Society , I am passing on to non-members ...

No 19 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century June 1993: On this Oxfam card Isobel in Blackheath tells Dan and Hilar...

Hands up all those who had never noticed that an ear has much the same shape as a full-term foetus in the womb, head down. Furthermore, ther...

Welcome home, Beatrice and Grumio. Fitzrovia was not the same without its Golden Couple.

I have long enjoyed Martin Gardiner's notes on ridiculous or pointless devices which someone must have been so proud of, or so hopeful f...

I have already described why I would never have made an engineer ; it is a sad story, but I was cheered recently by reading the biography of...

Not merely are the new words being added to the Oxford English Dictionary in March this year a dull lot, they are also fairly useless; I can...

An organisation was set up last year with £900,000 of the Department of Health's (i.e. our) money channelled via Prince Charles' lob...

Recycled posts from 2005 history A small town in Sussex was once part of the United States, sort of sport The sporting way to kill grouse ci...

No 18 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century November 1990: Dave and Sue to Mr and Mrs C in Merseyside. Arrived OK,...

More than four years ago Sainsbury's started calling their employees colleagues . This struck me as a bit soppy, and when I conducted a ...

I saw on TV the other day a young woman called Danielle Da Costa explaining how to be struck by a car so that you are hurled across its bonn...

As I mentioned the other day, I used to review West End plays from time to time for a chain of provincial weekly newspapers, and once I was...

In these dark times it was heartwarming to hear yesterday that Joanna Lumley has been granted the right to take up permanent residence in En...