In the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge there’s a seventeenth-century Dutch painting of some people walking on a beach. Last year, the painting went to be cleaned and, as she started to remove the old varnish, the conservator, Shan Kuang, noticed something unusual about the surface. It turned out that not only were there people on …
While Ben Stokes and Mark Wood were polishing off the Australian tail at Trent Bridge on Saturday morning, I was in the cellar. There are three things to take from that. First, that in the forty-one years since I first went to a test match I’ve seen very little that was as thrillingly unexpected or …
I was climbing with my son Silas yesterday. We’ll be doing that a lot this holiday. It’s brilliant fun – but it makes me anxious. Although the wall is only around four metres high, there are no ropes or harnesses, so if you fall, you hit the ground. I’m not brave and some moves make …
I went out for dinner on Monday night with my three children, Miriam, Esther and Silas. Miriam’s away at university now and Esther heads off in September, so the opportunities for us all to be together are increasingly limited. This dinner was special though, because until my birthday later this month, we are 100 years …
I went to a party last weekend, on the edge of Dartmoor. It was brilliant. Lots of old friends, more fun than I thought possible and even better than I’d hoped or expected. There was a cricket match for goodness sake. The party celebrated a combined 100th birthday for the hosts, an 18th for their …
Later on this evening, I’m going to be meeting up with some people I went to school with. There will be some very familiar faces, some I know less well, and more who’ll barely remember me, but the reason I’m going is for the handful I really love. These are my oldest friends, who have …
There are three boys in my family and they like to climb, so quite often we head for an indoor wall near us to go bouldering. Bouldering is climbing without ropes, solving technical problems at no great height and with comforting safety mats in case of a fall. However, even though the walls aren't that …
So, last night, I’m at home, cooking macaroni cheese. Now, my macaroni cheese is good. It is rich and golden, it is unctuous and gorgeous. It is an artery-hardening, full-fat delight. There is much cheese, of many varieties. And that’s the problem. There are three boys in my house, Sam, Silas and Linus, and they …
I was going to talk about holidays today: about the excellent John Lubbock, who, in 1871, introduced the Bank Holidays Act to fix national holidays in the working calendar and about how the Sabbath, one day’s rest in seven, shows that even God recognizes we all need a break sometimes. Instead, my producer wrote to …
As you’ve probably heard, over Easter they switched on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland again, hoping to find out something more about the ‘dark matter’ that seems to make up 96% of the mass of the universe. Like most people, I can’t begin to contemplate the complexity of the questions that are …