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Yesterday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Smart meters could soon cost you a whole lot more

What remarkable power climate change has to turn the usual rules of fairness on their head. The poor pay the taxes and the wealthy get subsidised. It has happened with electric cars, where well-off early adopters were handed grants of £4,000 to buy a new vehicle – as well as being excused fuel duty and road tax, essentially freeing them from having to make any contribution to the upkeep of roads. It has happened with heat pumps – whose owners have enjoyed years of subsidies, the latest manifestation of which is £7,500 in upfront grants. Surge pricing is a desperate solution to manage demand rather than maintain supply The next

Jim Lawley

Life lessons from the oldest people in the world

María Branyas Morera, aged 117, is the oldest person in the world. She was born in California on 4 March 1907 to Spanish parents who decided to return home in 1915. The voyage was an early lesson in adversity: her father died and María lost the hearing in one ear after she fell from the upper deck. The family settled in Catalonia and María worked as a nurse during the Spanish Civil War. After contracting pneumonia in 1993, she moved into a nursing home in Olot, some 70 miles north of Barcelona. There she played the piano until she was 108 and recovered from Covid-19 in 2020. A resilient, pragmatic

Lukas Degutis

The lost America of Palm Springs

California was once home to a certain vision of the American dream; Mamas & the Papas records, grinning surfers, chrome bumpers. Now LA and San Francisco are full of glass and steel and petty criminals. Escape their sketchy downtowns and you’ll find huge copy-and-paste estates of identical homes. Urban sprawl has choked off California’s charm in everywhere but Palm Springs, a desert valley city to the east of Los Angeles.  Kirk Douglas lived here, alongside Rock Hudson, Janet Gaynor and Frank Sinatra. Elvis and Priscilla Presley honeymooned in the city for the whole of 1967. Producers would often oblige their stars to remain within a two-hours drive of their LA studios.

Tuesday

Hannah Tomes Hannah Tomes

My old friend went viral for all the wrong reasons

Last week, an old acquaintance went viral. Charles Withers had, according to his pregnant wife, disappeared around a year ago, leaving her to bring up one young child alone with another on the way. The pretty Massachusetts blonde posted a plea for information on Facebook. It was, she wrote, surprisingly difficult to divorce someone who refused to return your calls.  In an age of near-constant surveillance, how does it feel when the choice to disappear is taken from you? Not long after the story surfaced, I received a message from a friend. ‘Do you remember Charlie Withers?’ he asked. I did. He had been part of our wider social circle, one of the

Julie Bindel

Italian food purists need to calm down

Last year, a large group of young people gathered outside the Trevi Fountain, one of Rome’s most popular attractions, to protest against ‘food crimes’ committed by tourists in Italy. Armed with signs reading ‘No more cream in carbonara’, ‘No more cappuccino with pasta’, and ‘Putting chicken in pasta is a crime in Italy’, they drew the attention of a large crowd of tourists. The protest was sparked by complaints from a number of the city’s restaurant owners about non-Italians (Americans in particular) asking for unorthodox ingredients to be added to the classics.  ‘If my customers want chicken in their pasta, and to them it tastes nice, then they will have it’ The organiser,

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

The Third Man fan’s guide to Vienna

The greatest movie ever made celebrates its 75th anniversary this year and I’ll be watching it – for the umpteenth time – with appropriately fine fizz at hand. Sorry, what? Oh, come on, I’m talking about The Third Man. There’s no finer film. I thought everyone knew that. You know, written by Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reed and set in a battered, broken, postwar Vienna. It stars Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins and Orson Welles as Harry Lime and there’s sterling support from Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee and Wilfrid Hyde-White, whose comic cameo almost steals the show. Vienna is the real star of course, shot in brooding black and

Monday

Mary Dejevsky

Britain’s roads are becoming a Soviet nightmare

In the dog days of 2021, I spent a grey Sunday afternoon driving around a part of London with a view to an eventual flat move. Why take the car? Because the bus routes didn’t match where I planned to go, I wanted to stay over ground, and I would be able to cover more territory than on foot. It seemed an innocent enough way of spending my time, and the traffic was blissfully light.  So I was surprised to receive – with remarkable speed – a Penalty Charge Notice for using what was called a prohibited road. The notice was supported by two photos of my car, which I