BY THE River Swincombe, on Dartmoor, are the ruins of John Bishop’s house. The tumbled-down building has been empty since, well, to look at it hundreds of years. Actually, it was occupied until 1911, and renovated in 1969 as a film set. So what? Well, to put it another way: there are many fine and…
A politics-free zone YOU SHOULD expect the unexpected from a country occupied largely by Flemish and Walloons. I’m sorry if this offends any Belgian readers, but to my English-speaking ear “Walloon” sounds like something out of Monty Python – and the country’s record 541 days without a government could have been scripted by a satirist…
IT’S THAT time of year again: the panto season, and we all love tradition, don’t we? At their last full council meeting of the year our elected representatives in Plymouth like to do the whole “He’s behind you!” thing. Julian Clary and Keith Harris, appearing in Cinderella at the city’s Theatre Royal, have nothing to…
YOUR nation needs you … to drink more coffee. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, has welcomed plans to open 300 new Starbucks coffee shops as a “great boost to the economy”. Nearly 200 of the new outlets will be “drive-throughs”, a fine British tradition and one that is certain to take off in this era…
May 14, 2010 THE trouble with being a political commentator is that sometimes you invent a clever phrase and cannot bear to let events stop you using it. We’ve all done that. The national newspaper columnist who wrote that Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg wasn’t so much the hand of history as its finger puppet…
Keith Rossiter 