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This week I bought a rice cooker in preparation for my youngest daughter leaving home to begin her gap year in London. The outside of the box boasts about the benefits of the cooker – ‘two perfect portions’, ‘slow even cooking’, ‘space saving design’, ‘energy efficient’, and so it goes on. It makes it all sound wonderful, and it is. But inside the box are more detailed instructions on how to...

I’ve never been a huge fan of visiting the dentist. Ten years at boarding school eating too many sweets took their toll. My teenage years were spent having countless fillings, and in the years since I’ve had a root canal done twice and an extraction. But things sank to yet another level when I left my most recent dental check-up with a prescription for toothpaste! My dentist had cheerfully informe...

Sooner or later every loving parent discovers that caring for children leads to backache. This is for the simple reason that our children are smaller than we are and that in order to attend to their needs we must be constantly bending down to their level. It begins with changing nappies and lifting crying infants from their cot, and continues as toddlers discover what fun it is to throw things ont...

My son and I were playing Monopoly on the decking outside our holiday home, when a gust of wind picked up The Strand property card and dropped it neatly through a gap between two planks. Peering through the gap the card was clearly visible but out of reach. For a few moments we debated whether to rescue the card as it was clearly going to take some effort. If it had been Mayfair then definitely, t...

As a child I fancied myself as a bit of an escape artist, but sadly with not much success. My brother records one occasion on which I asked to be gagged, tied to a chair in my bedroom and left alone to free myself. Things didn’t go to plan. In my struggle to be free I tipped the chair over and wedged my head between the mattress of my bed and the footboard. Unable to get free and with my cries for...

“We choose to go to the moon and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, and one which we intend to win.” These are the words of President Kennedy in 1962, words that would be fulfilled just seven years later. I rather wish that my mobile phone provider shared the same vision and enthusiasm....

On 6 th July 2019 seven female students were awarded their degrees in medicine by the University of Edinburgh. Nothing unremarkable about that you might think, but the degrees were posthumous and should have been awarded 150 years ago.  Known as the Edinburgh Seven the ladies were led by Sophia Jex-Blake who was determined to follow her dream of becoming a doctor. But she lived in an age when...

The English crowd roared with delight as Ellen White tapped in the pass from Beth Mead that levelled the score against their world cup semi-final opponents the USA. But the celebrations were cut short as a flag was raised for offside and a tense wait ensued while the virtual referee decided whether or not an offence had been committed. Tragically for England it had, but only just. The video showed...

For those of us who can’t wait to find out what happens next, the advent of streaming and the ability to binge watch our favourite TV series, has been a welcome innovation. No longer do we have to wait for a whole week between episodes, now we can watch them all in one sitting. So recently I binge watched the second series of Killing Eve, racing from one cliff-hanger ending to the next, and all in...

When I was a child accessing information generally meant either a visit to the library, and several hours spent trawling through an assortment of books, or finding someone who knew what I wanted to know. These days we just ask Siri or Alexa. But what about the times when they can’t answer our questions?  Some years ago, I was faced with a large end of year tax bill that I simply couldn’t pay....

Of all the bromances that might be imagined, there is perhaps none so unlikely as the one that seems to be growing between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. This week Kim was pictured holding a letter from Donald which he described as ‘excellent’ and containing ‘interesting content.’ The letter was a reply to a ‘beautiful letter’ that Kim sent Donald earlier in the month. Where these overtures between...

I thought I’d impress my new friend with one of my travel stories. I told him of the time I flew into Cali, Colombia only to discover that my suitcase was missing. I was suitably impressed when my case was quickly located in Madrid and I was promised that it would be delivered to my apartment in the city the next afternoon, which it was. Not only that but I was given $60 in cash as immediate compe...

Following the successful D-Day landings the British 22 nd Armoured Brigade were racing to take the town of Caen. Pausing before the final push, they got out of their tanks to brew up a lovely cup of tea. It proved to be a terrible mistake. A German tank commander seized his chance and launched an attack. Within minutes the British had lost 14 tanks and 15 armoured vehicles and anti-tank guns. It h...

While General Eisenhower masterminded the D-Day landings, he himself gave the credit for their success to someone you’ve probably never hear of, Andrew Higgins. Higgins wasn’t a soldier but a brilliant designer of boats, and it was he who solved the biggest problem facing an amphibious assault – how to get troops and equipment onto the beaches fast enough to overwhelm the enemy and establish a bri...

Following his conversion in 1888 a young William Leslie felt called to become a medical missionary. He went first to Angola and then in 1912 moved to Vanga in a remote corner of the DRC. But after 17 years of hard work and feeling that he had made no impact, he returned home discouraged. Nine years later he died disappointed at the legacy he thought he had left behind. But fast forward nearly a ce...

Published in Philadelphia in 1810 The Mirror of Taste magazine carried the following report,‘A young fellow threw his hat into the ring and followed, when the lame umpire called out “a challenge,” and proceeded to equip the challenger for the game. … He then walked round the ring till a second hat was thrown in, and the umpire called out, “the challenge is answered.”’ So wa...

One day Jordan Rogers was a care worker living in a council house and struggling to make ends meet. The next day he was Lord of the Manor having unexpectedly inherited an estate of some 1,500 acres, a mansion house and an income of £1,000 a week. Born to a single mother Jordan had never been certain who his father was until a DNA test proved that he was the son and rightful heir of the owner of th...

In the mid-1990’s Christie’s auction house in London sent out their latest recruit to undertake his first valuation. Smartly dressed in a three-piece suit and carrying a leather briefcase he duly arrived at the address in Soho. It soon became clear that it was a boarding house of some kind, with a different nameplate on every door. Finding the correct door, he was somewhat surprised to be greeted...

Some lucky customers at the Hawksmoor restaurant in Manchester had an unexpected surprise when the waiter accidentally served them the wrong wine. They had ordered a bottle of Bordeaux for £260 but instead the waiter gave them a bottle worth £4,500. Sadly, it appears that the customers didn’t realise the value of the wine they were drinking. This, of course, is not the first-time waiters have been...

‘I genuinely think that science does not rule out the existence of a creator.’ So said renowned British physicist Brian Cox in a recent interview with Russell Brand. He went on to say that a Creator can’t be ruled out because we simply don’t know. We don’t know whether the universe had a beginning, and if it did how it began. He concludes by saying, ‘The answer is we don’t know, full stop. We are...

You might want to celebrate with your friends If you ever find a 20p dated 2017. While in a normal year the Royal Mint produces millions of them, in that year not a single 20p was minted for general circulation. Just a few commemorative coins were made.  The reason for this appears to be the introduction of the new 12-sided £1 coin and the phasing out over six months of the old round one. Sud...

During the Russian communist era an attempt was made to improve workers’ productivity by abandoning the Biblical ideal of working for six days and resting on the seventh. The assumption was that if people put in more working days with fewer breaks then they would produce more. But the reverse happened, productivity fell, and the experiment failed. The wisdom of the Bible was proved right. I was re...

In about 1913 two politicians met at the Central Café in Vienna. Discussing the likelihood of a Russian revolution one looked across the room and said, “And who’s going to lead it? – him?” The man to whom he referred was none other than Leon Trotsky, renowned at the time for idleness, but who would indeed lead a revolution that would change the course of history. At the beginning of this Holy Week...

As many a president and prime minister will attest, a career that begins on a wave of popular support doesn’t always end that way. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher was swept to power as the new British Prime Minister with the biggest swing in support from Labour since 1945. But a decade later the glory had faded, and she was forced to step down. Then in 1997 Tony Blair swept to power as the next Labour P...

Sandwiched between a coffee shop and a pub near St James’s Park tube station in London, stands an unremarkable looking building. With a plain black door and frosted glass windows there’s nothing to suggest that it’s a building of any great importance. Yet for 66 years it provided a London home for the British government’s secret intelligence agency GCHQ. For those living in the vicinity it was an...