Interiors: Weather-proof furniture ideas to decorate terraces, patios and balconies for the British summertime May 22, 2017 This year, the outdoor room comes of age. Not just a Big Green Egg and some deckchairs, but a full-blown lounge, as if we lived in Palm Springs. Just as we now love to bring the outside in we are discovering that a raft of technical innovations mean we can bring the inside out. The [...]
Long Weekend in a magnesium bath at Princess Yaiza, Lanzarote May 19, 2017 The weekend: If, like most City workers, you spend long hours hunched over a keyboard, punctuated by occasional bursts of exercise that you never properly warm down from, you’ve probably got your share of aches and pains. This is why holidays offering spa “cures” are increasingly attractive. The Princesa Yaiza Resort Hotel in Lanzarote offers [...]
Long Weekend in El Jadida, Morocco: Golf and belly-dancing at Mazagan Beach Resort May 12, 2017 The weekend: Spend a long weekend on the central western Atlantic coast of Morocco, a region that combines the old town charm of El Jadida – formerly named El Mazagan – and the luxury of the five-star Mazagan Beach Resort complex. The micro-climate here offers pleasant weather year-round, but with tourism still in its ascendancy [...]
Brunch in Dubai is luxurious in the extreme. Just be careful not to eat the golden macarons – they’re purely decorative… May 12, 2017 Visiting a destination for the first time is like being on a first date. You want to go to a nice restaurant, you’d like him to be charming, but arriving with six dozen roses and a list of potential baby names is probably overkill. Dubai is like the most try-hard of bunny boiler boyfriends, the [...]
Prey review: Arkane Studio’s deep space horror shooter has hidden depths, not least of which is the ability to turn into a shoe May 10, 2017 In space, people eat a whole lot of lemons. Everywhere you go aboard the derelict Talos I space station you find discarded citrus peels, a cavalcade of zesty collectibles that you can gather up and convert into more useful materials. Prey is, very surprisingly, a game that’s largely about scavenging through bins for assorted bits [...]
Fitness when you’re over 40: Age is no excuse for not hitting your fitness goals May 10, 2017 What’s stopping you getting fit? This is one of my favourite questions in my consultations with clients. Lots of people say: “Well, I’m not as young as I used to be, the weight just won’t come off” – this is not a valid answer. Age is purely an excuse, not a barrier. Yes, you [...]
The Treatment review: A darkly satirical take on the movie business and its players May 5, 2017 The Treatment is a work of lofty, detached genius, reminiscent of the jostling intellectualism of Martin Amis – it's dense, complex, and utterly assured of its own brilliance. On face value, it’s about how the media – in this case, the film industry – edits and rewrites “truth” until it’s at best a distant cousin [...]
Famed for its whaling history, the tiny Cape Cod island of Nantucket has a modern speciality – its vibrant foodie scene May 5, 2017 As I feasted on delicacies from Cru’s raw bar – little neck clams, lobster cocktail with avocado and preserved lemon, a half dozen Fifth Bend oysters washed down with a Crucomber, a cocktail of bison grass vodka, cucumber and toasted sesame – I could see everything from sailboats to sleek super-yachts bobbing around in the [...]
Sleepless review: A buzzing cast can’t rescue this low-rent Die Hard-alike May 5, 2017 Universally recognised as the greatest film about clambering around inside air vents ever made, Die Hard has inspired a long list of distinguished imitators, each of them about crawling around inside different kinds of building. Among them was 2011 French action film Nuit Blanche, about a bent cop who gets tangled up in a [...]
Mercedes GLK 250 review: We travel to Bahrain, the Monaco of the Middle East, to test drive Mercedes’ junior SUV May 3, 2017 It’s appropriate that Bahrain should celebrate high-octane sports; it was here that oil was first discovered in the Gulf, after all. Fireworks explode in a riot of colours overhead as Sebastian Vettel’s Ferrari takes the Bahrain Grand Prix’s chequered flag, followed by Lewis Hamilton six seconds later as the sky above the grandstands erupts. The [...]