Jasbindar Singh

While there is no simple solution to the above, and everyone is different, there is a delightful antidote to this conundrum...

Paul Smith

Sometimes there’s an awful convergence about issues in news stories and other media around the world. It would hardly come as news to many women, but this week that convergence was more powerful than ever. First, the US elections threw up – which is  possibly the best way to put it – a reference by a Republican senator on rape and as a result sometimes, the God-given gift of life. Never mind choice, autonomy, sensitivity and naturally it aroused the anger of woman all over the country.

Robyn Yousef

Being evacuated from a Leicester Square bar in the 70s when the IRA were targeting London was akin to a rite of passage for this-then young Kiwi traveller. But being caught up in a bomb scare at Dunedin Airport just seemed bizarre.

Paul Smith

Paul Smith

Any given week is peopled with everyday encounters with strangers. Most we ignore, others we acknowledge in the protocols of courtesy. And then there are those we cannot forget, those who humble us with their experiences and remind us that there but for good fortune, go you and I...

Having had lunch with a friend in her bay window overlooking a long, white, empty beach nearby, and then afternoon tea with a couple of friends to swap books, I hadn’t really thought about what to feed us in the evening. Something quick was wanted, so I fell back on my old standby, my unorthodox version of kedgeree, made with a tin of salmon – cheap too.

Bryan Appleyard

“I had suicidal thoughts,” says Clive James. “They all promptly vanished the moment I was under real threat. There was a sudden urge to live”...

There are piles of books on the floor. All the paintings except a single Sidney Nolan have gone from the walls. Contracts are due to be exchanged. In Cambridge, in a house full of books, a study is being prepared. The London life of Clive James is coming to an end.

“I have to be near my doctors,” he explains.

That much is obvious. Not long ago he was a great striding Aussie bull, confidently chuckling his way through life, art and literary society. Martin Amis once told me that when asked how James liked his steak, he would reply: “Knock off its horns and wipe its arse.”

Read more...   http://www.bryanappleyard.com/clive-james-de-profundis/

Yesterday afternoon I was thrown out of the cinema. Friend and I had gone to see our favourite film before it went off. Quarter of an hour into the familiar dialogue, chuckling at the jokes we’d laughed at before, the film disappeared and a weak little light appeared at the top of the stairs. We waited for them to fix the tape, but instead a girl appeared and said it was a power cut. Great gnashing of teeth. I was thankful for the feeble light by the stairs, imagining what it would have been like to have been plunged into total darkness, and a stampede for the only exit at the bottom of the stairs.