In Malta over the Easter weekend I stumbled on one of the thousands of World War II grave sites that are tucked away in every corner of the world. This one, the Kalkara Naval Cemetery, like many, contains the remains of a few Polish servicemen. There are also German, Italian, British, French Japanese(!) and, of [...]

I’m going to write about Polish food again. Even as I was typing that sentence Poland’s sixth sense of persecution began tingling and a thousand emails beginning with the words “Ha! English kitchen is rubbish” were auto-created on the whirling servers beneath the Ministry of Knee-Jerk Reactions. Nevertheless, I’m going to plough on because there [...]

There is no easy way to explain why I was listening to Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4, so we’ll just assume there was an inexplicable internet protocol error that prevented me from listening to classic rock like a real man and leave it at that. One of the regular features of Woman’s Hour is [...]

I have only one wish in life: I would like a simple, efficient bedside lamp. Actually I have two wishes, but the second one is for a sitcom about former Arab dictators sharing a flat in Brixton (Hosni! Have you been eating my humus again!?), which would be much more difficult to organise. Or at [...]

The weather gods are clearly engaged in one of those parties where you drunkenly leave your keys in a big bowl and pick out each others’ spouses/climatic responsibilities. The autumn guy got harsh mid-winter, the mid-winter guy got damp autumn and, as we will soon see, the spring guy probably got tornadoes-falls-of-frogs-and-other-freakish-stuff. So here we [...]

So I’m poking around on the website of the Central Anticorruption Bureau (important journalistic research doncha know) and it occurs to me to wonder what I would do if I was foreigner wanting to report a heinous act of corruption—like my wife scoffing all the Christmas fruit cake for example. I clicked over to the [...]