The Oldie

Prue Leith (p14) is a judge on The Great British Bake Off. She set up Leith’s restaurant and Leith’s School of Food and Wine. Her new book, Bliss on Toast, is based on her Oldie column. Mary Kenny (p24) has written for The Oldie since our first issue

46% of men won’t eat out without dog Sunday Mirror Toilets to get a spruce up Cornish Times Sheriff blasts drunken 999 nuisance caller who said she was a vampire needing a Pot Noodle Press and Journal £15 for published contributions The November issu

Is it time to burn my books? My wife has already told me she is getting rid of the lot the moment I go. So, given the cost-of-living crisis and the rocketing price of fuel, is this the year for me to clear the grate and set a match to all my treasure

With every week that passes, the unanswerables pile up until the heap threatens to dwarf Everest. If a segment of the British (let’s be frank – English) electorate regrets Boris Johnson’s passing, for example, why isn’t Albion Straitjackets Plc the f

I have spent periods of my life going dotty. I also taught full-time until retirement and have had five books published by reputable houses – which I like to offset against my sojourns in the bin. One of those spells was in January 2006. I was one of

In August 1881, George Newnes, an enterprising Mancunian restaurateur, spotted an item called ‘A runaway train’ in the Manchester Evening News. This ‘tit-bit’, he thought, was just the sort of diverting story that would appeal to his customers – cler

Quiet quitting is when your mind checks out of a job while your body still goes through the motions. It is not to be confused with slacking. You are sitting at your terminal. You are hitting your quotas. You are doing everything your contract demands

Sheep is to mutton as pig is to… What? Bacon? Chops? Sausages? Shall I just hedge my bets and write down all three? No, you idiot – it must be pork. The precious seconds tick away. ‘It’s too soon to be concerned, Mrs Bardwell. I don’t think they’ve l

Like the Sirens in the Odyssey, the cosmetics counters lure us in. Their products – it is convincingly explained – have the power magically to transform us. So convincingly, in fact, that I’ve always assumed the reason they haven’t worked on me must

I have always been sceptical about those surveys that maintain that moving house is one of the most stressful ‘life events’. Divorce, death of a loved one, being sacked – surely these catastrophes must trump a house move? (The word ‘stress’ of course

Results. You may think it’s terrible for the children, but the final week before the results is pretty tense for us teachers, too. It is time to admit that we have favourites who we pray will pull through, or shine, because they have worked so hard.

The younger mice in the household are starting to think about whether to leave the nest. Furious debates have ensued. Mrs Mouse is keen to let them live at home for as long as possible, but Granny Mouse’s advice – unsolicited – is different. She thin

In old age, the legendary Lady Diana Cooper had a minor driving accident, hitting a bollard by the road. She instantly gave up her car. Her son, John Julius Norwich, told me that her agonised response was ‘What if that had been a child?’ She loved he

• Half of Earth’s rain falls in the 12 wettest days of the year. • It is most likely to be raining at 7am and least likely at 3am. • London gets less rain than Rome, Venice or Nice. South East England has lower annual rainfall than Jerusalem or Beiru

Ronald Allison reigned over the Buckingham Palace press office with calm and good humour from 1973 until 1978. He was already well known as a football reporter, having commentated on the 1966 World Cup Final on telly. He knew about the real world. Th

‘Get a grip!’ That’s the line said to those who have overreacted to – or psychologically collapsed altogether in the face of – a disagreeable or unwanted event. Calling on someone to get a grip is like saying, ‘Pull yourself together.’ Of course, in

It was 2008 and I would shortly be retiring from my job teaching at City College in Norwich. I had sold my house, moved into a rented property and planned to buy a bungalow in the country. Now came a problem – where to put the quarter of a million po

Jonathan Cape £20 I don’t like novels – never have. There’s quite enough going on in the real world without making more stuff up. Ian McEwan tries to get around the stricture by putting real stuff in. Shuffled together in his new big book, therefore,

Bloomsbury Circus £16.99 Kamila Shamsie is a British-Pakistani novelist who structures her fiction around historical and personal turning-points: partition in 1947, the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, the nuclear attacks on Japan and 9/11. Her fi

Oneworld £20 Hindsight is not always a fine thing – especially when it comes to wars. Widely-held opinion, aided and abetted by fictions like Julian Fellowes’s Gosford Park and Kasuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, still caricatures the coalition

The 200th anniversary of the birth of Sir Harry Flashman VC has been greeted with an outpouring of affection and admiration. You can imagine the old rogue laughing off the adulation, while inwardly relishing it all. And yes, I know, unlike those alle

There is one passage in Andrew Roberts’s superlative biography of Lord Northcliffe – founder of the Daily Mail and quondam owner of the Times – that has set me thinking. Roberts cites an essay written by Northcliffe in 1903, in which the press baron

One condition I am not in danger of contracting is bungalow legs. This recently identified ailment is where older people lose mobility in their legs because they have downsized to a bungalow and never climb stairs any more. Two of my 80-plus friends

THE LOST KING (12A) (Out on 7th October) The discovery of Richard III’s painfully twisted skeleton, a decade ago, in a Leicester car park must be one of the greatest stories of all time. The tale now assumes an extra layer of haunting, sombre signifi

ONIONS July and August are the months for runner beans but, for the first time in my memory, thanks to drought conditions this summer, none grew in my garden. The flowers appeared but were not followed by beans. Other growers had the same experience.

How very appropriate that the Queen’s death was announced just after the six-o’clock news bulletin. Mishal Husain’s well-spoken tones made the historic statement, followed by Evan Davis’s reading of the tweet from the Palace. On the number 11 bus, I

BY THE ADRIATIC WATERS Every one of you has a restaurant home. It’s a hearth away from the drudgery and tedium of your own kitchen – where the prospect of washing-up and the memory of heated family arguments loom large. There’s a place each of us yea

CARRY ON CAMPARI My cocktail cabinet is not a thing of permanence. For a start, it is not a cabinet – just a wooden, bottle-crowded tray that sits on the floor next to a wine rack, and its constituents get shuffled more often than the Downing Street

KING OF SPORTS REPORTERS There was an article recently in the Daily Telegraph that created quite a stir online. Just after the final of the Women’s Euros, David Miller wrote a piece suggesting that the victory by England’s female players at Wembley m

There are few things as transient as ‘the next big thing’. Look at the uncertain world of social media – the likes of Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. You may have tried some of them but if you haven’t, I wouldn’t worry. Most will probably be

Rick Stroud, author of Kidnap in Crete, his tale of the wartime kidnap of General Kreipe, writes, ‘Crete is a wonderful destination – a land of heroes, mountain ranges and fertile plains where sheep graze among olive trees and the air is filled with

Is there anything you can’t leave home without? My lipstick and my dog, Freddie, an Irish terrier. What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? Going to my grandfather’s farm in Cornwall with my brother, which I loved. I grew up in Kenya till I

An alluring name on the map is as good a reason for a walk as any. As my eyes prospected over the charted wilds of Leicestershire, they alighted on the River Sence. Here, surely, was a gift for The Oldie’s headline-writers. I considered the valley’s

IN COMPETITION No 284 you were invited to write a poem with the title Difficult Delivery. Speeches, babies and post each had their advocates, while David Shields focused on a cricket ball. Father Christmas in Peter Hollindale’s entry complained, ‘My

Q My husband suffers from quite severe anxiety, which makes it impossible for him to travel beyond a radius of about 60 minutes’ drive from home, or to sleep away from home. He is content, having travelled widely in his working life. I would love to

I was rather jealous of the winner of the Reading Agency’s World Book Night’s competition – apart from a bundle of books they also won a year’s supply of Magnum ice cream. That would have been very welcome during the recent heat waves. World Book Nig

Wm Collins, 308pp, £20 Before Covid struck, the Prince Rupert hotel in Shrewsbury was a sumptuous, timber-framed four-star hostelry, 900 years old. But then it was forced to close and its management responded to the government’s ‘everyone in’ initiat

Alice Munro’s luminous writing career spans more than 60 years of her long life. She is the author of a solitary novel Lives of Girls and Women (1971), which is really a collection of interconnected stories, but otherwise she has devoted herself to t

HOW ANIMAL SENSES REVEAL THE HIDDEN REALMS AROUND US Bodley Head, 464pp, £20 Science writer Ed Yong won a Pulitzer Prize for his brilliantly researched articles on Covid, and An Immense World, his study of animal perception, has been rapturously rece

Forty years ago, Hermann Hesse was everywhere. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, translated into 60 languages, his timeless stories were popular all around the world. And then he disappeared. I read him avidly in my teens and then forgot al

AN INVENTORY Jonathan Cape, 368pp, £20 Caroline Sullivan in the Guardian said the book ‘ambles through 25 years, tracking Cocker’s worldview as it takes shape in his home city of Sheffield. It opens in the present day, as he’s clearing out the loft o

Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor Jonathan Anstee Supplements editor Liz Anderson Editorial assistant Amelia Milne Publisher James Pembroke Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kow