Brilliant concepts are often described in risible ways: ‘push the envelope’, ‘wake up and smell the coffee’, ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’, ‘let’s make a plan going forward’ and ‘blue-sky-thinking’. I aim to do all of those things most of the time, but never, ever will you get me to use any of those phrases. […]
I was invited to a friend’s house last night, on one condition. We had to sit in the dark. It turns out we were marking Earth Hour by eschewing electricity. I admit that our gesture of solidarity to the planet was small, but sixty minutes of candle-lit gloom became slightly addictive. Four hours later we […]
Like people, there are recipes blessed with both beauty and elegant names. When my daughter was four years old, she heard a waiter in a Portuguese restaurant say that the fish of the day was ‘pan-fried-fillet-of-golden-bream’. It had such a poetic lilt to it that my daughter repeated the name of this dish endlessly, enchanted […]
