If you can knock out a half-decent soup or stew, you will have
little trouble making a good beer from scratch,
says Thomas Wintle
Josie Gunn: I need to make a confession. Once a
week, I like to spend a couple of hours with like-minded
individuals, listening to strange music, poring over arcane
volumes, and re-enacting rituals that are incomprehensible to the
outside world. Yes, I play Dungeons and Dragons.
Pastimes: Simon Nicholas on keeping
chickens
I CONFESS: I arrange flowers, and I am on the rota of not one
church, but two. Floristry has its Jamies and Nigellas, and at its
high end is expensively fashionable. Not so with church
flower-ladies, who, as a breed, often have a terrible reputation -
imperious, intransigent, and taking over the vestry with their
paraphernalia.
Ronald Blythe takes the train for a rare
visit to the City
Ronald Blythe becomes part of the wildlife at a birthday beach-party
AFTER a little service for St Barnabas, a favourite of mine, we are off to the birthday party at Suffolk’s ultima Thule, Shingle Street. It is where countless stones breed countless flowers, and the North...
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Your answers
Whence came the preacher’s “three points”? Where written of at length? Functional?
John Stott, Rector of All Souls’, Langham Place, was...
Home from home
GENOA is the most British of Italian cities, or so it asserted on one of the captions on an explanatory panel displayed in the Anglican Church of the Holy Ghost, marking the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and replete with photos of Her Majesty’s visit to the city in October...
IT IS flaming June (i.e. blowing a rain-sodden gale again); so I reach for Food for the Rich, by Paul Reboux, first published in 1927 (Blond, 1958), and read what he recommends for a picnic, illustrated by an Edwardian couple in a punt.
“What shall we take?” he writes. “The answer...
A CLEAR day. Not empty day. The difference should be, well, clear. Nobody is coming, the diary says. Give yourself a break from the new book, my head says. The skies concur. Venus having wandered across the sun, cloud Alps promise downpours as contrition. Even planets should know...
Where?
ON THE River Thames in Oxfordshire, Wallingford is midway between Oxford and Reading, and can be reached by car from either in less than an hour, or by bus. There are frequent buses, too, from the nearest railway station, Didcot Parkway.
Why?
Wallingford...