The world’s traditional weights and measures are amongst the few remaining living links we still have with our most distant ancestors – from the pre-literate tribesmen who would measure the height of their livestock with the width of their hands to the invaders from Rome who counted out their marches in thousand-pace units, the mille passus, our mile – And I cannot for the life of me understand how abolishing all of this in favour of a made-up system designed for tidy-minded bureaucrats is anything but the most shocking and ignorant cultural vandalism.
An astronaut enjoyed my first book so much that he took my picture to space. This does sound pretty incredible and I wouldn’t believe it myself if I didn’t have some evidence. I’ve got a photograph of Piers Sellers (the spaceman) holding a photocopied jacket shot of me against the window of a space shuttle. You can see Planet Earth through the glass, 115 miles below.
Without doubt I have been at my happiest in the small hours after a comedy gig, the audience gone, laughs still echoing from the walls, enjoying a drink with the other comics, mind still buzzing into the night.
Biography-writing is always an eye-opening, perception-confounding experience. Never have I found this to be more true than in my research for my new book about masterchef Heston Blumenthal. The classy man with the common touch, he truly represents the best of Berkshire.
Toska. It’s the Russian word for longing – a particular kind of longing, of nostalgia for home and country and one’s own. It’s what all Russian exiles suffered from.
The Observer revealed that between 2001-8 there were ‘more than 1,750 leaks, breakdowns or other “events”’ in Britain’s nuclear facilities (including Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire)
