Let’s say they’re not quite in-laws yet because these aren’t the Victorian times. But perhaps you’ve been dating for a few months and the moment has arrived. You’re meeting the people who could, maybe one day, be your in-laws. Hopefully you won’t do as badly as one of my friends, who was caught, ahem, at … Read more
With his Gaelic name and love of board games, 6ft 3in, russet-bearded furniture-maker Eion Gibbs bears more than a passing resemblance to his medieval predecessors, those Norse-Gaels who whiled away the dark northern evenings playing chess and backgammon in their chilly longhouses and castle halls. Based in the Highlands, where he was brought up and … Read more
My flatmate has started taking online French lessons. It’s a lot harder than when we took the subject at GCSE, she says, because her current teacher insists on over-philosophising everything. Truthfully, I once overheard him lecture the class on how happiness has become a pipe dream due to technology and that people were far happier … Read more
Wuthering Heights but make it Brat. This sentence would have made no sense even 18 months ago, yet here we are, in the year 2025, watching a trailer for an Emerald Fennell adaptation with an original score and soundtrack by Charli XCX. Anything can happen. Like anyone who is chronically online, halfway through watching Margot … Read more
Mark Gatiss will never do Taskmaster because people assume he is very clever and he’d like to keep it that way. He reveals this to me over lunch in Franco’s, London’s oldest, and very delicious, Italian restaurant. He is best known for playing the impeccably dressed (and very clever) Mycroft Holmes in the immensely popular … Read more