Fixing a hole
The last time I thought about taking heroin was yesterday. I had received ‘an inconvenient truth’ from a beautiful woman. It wasn’t about climate change (I’m not that ecologically switched on). She...
View ArticleInvestment: A stock-picker confesses
My name’s Freddy and I’m an online gambling addict. The problem started a few years ago when I opened an account on Betfair.com. At first it was small bets on football games, maybe the odd greyhound. A...
View ArticleStiffen the sinews
In this book about courage, Polly Morland talks to lots of people who should know what it is. She talks to soldiers, surfers, a matador, firefighters and professional daredevils. She interviews a man...
View ArticleTrinny Woodall: how I became a cocaine addict — and how I beat it
I’m Trinny, I’m an alcoholic and I’m an addict. When asked whether addiction is a disease, I didn’t have to think twice. Knowing that I have a disease is how I manage to have a healthy life today. All...
View ArticleShould we be threatening cocaine addicts with execution?
Mao Tse-tung was by far the greatest therapist of drug addiction in world history. He threatened to execute opium addicts if they didn’t give up. Threats to murder were about the only utterances of...
View ArticleThe gambler’s daily grind
Lord Doyle is a shrivelled English gambler frittering away his money and destroying his liver in the casinos of Macau. Aptly, since he is in a place filled with mock-Venetian canals and poor...
View ArticleThe kick of the habit
I was waiting on an office forecourt recently puffing on an e-cigarette when a security guard came out. ‘You can’t smoke here,’ he shouted. ‘I’m not, actually,’ I replied. He went to consult his...
View ArticleWhy I intend to become an addict
When the White Queen told Alice she had sometimes believed as many as six contradictory things before breakfast, she spoke for us all. But our irrationality goes further than a simple after-the-event...
View Article8 November 2014
Mind games Sir: I hope that people are not unduly put off by Melanie McDonagh’s misrepresentation of mindfulness as a cop-out for navel-gazers who lack the moral fibre to engage in ‘proper’ religion...
View ArticleSugar rush
The Cereal Killer Café is a temple to cereal on Brick Lane, east London. It serves only cereal — and also Pop-Tarts, which taste like pavements smeared with chocolate — and flavoured milk. It has been...
View ArticleAddicted to trouble
Few first novels are as successful as S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, which married a startling and unusual premise to a tightly controlled and claustrophobic thriller. Its only drawback was that...
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Junk policy
In 1982 a doctor called John Marks walked into a grey little GP surgery in the Wirral, in the drizzly north of England where they used to build ships but now they built nothing. It was his first day as...
View ArticleGiving up alcohol is not as much fun as I’d hoped
Two months ago, I set myself the target of losing 11 pounds in time for the Spectator’s summer party on 1 July. To help achieve that, I swore off alcohol and, had I succeeded, my plan was to start...
View ArticleLong life
The smart phone is a wonderful thing. We are never out of touch anymore, neither with friends nor with the world at large. But increasingly we read of the harm that it is doing us. We are no longer its...
View ArticleBuilding this lay-by is all I can think about now
Many years ago I was encouraged to read Roger Hutchinson’s Calum’s Road. The small and quirky book made a deep impression on me: deeper, perhaps, than I realised at the time. Since then the story has...
View ArticleFixing a hole
Listen http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_07032013.m4a The last time I thought about taking heroin was yesterday. I had received ‘an inconvenient truth’ from a beautiful woman. It...
View ArticleInvestment: A stock-picker confesses
My name’s Freddy and I’m an online gambling addict. The problem started a few years ago when I opened an account on Betfair.com. At first it was small bets on football games, maybe the odd greyhound....
View ArticleStiffen the sinews
In this book about courage, Polly Morland talks to lots of people who should know what it is. She talks to soldiers, surfers, a matador, firefighters and professional daredevils. She interviews a man...
View ArticleTrinny Woodall: how I became a cocaine addict — and how I beat it
I’m Trinny, I’m an alcoholic and I’m an addict. When asked whether addiction is a disease, I didn’t have to think twice. Knowing that I have a disease is how I manage to have a healthy life today. All...
View ArticleShould we be threatening cocaine addicts with execution?
Mao Tse-tung was by far the greatest therapist of drug addiction in world history. He threatened to execute opium addicts if they didn’t give up. Threats to murder were about the only utterances of...
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