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I stupidly fell for email tax rebate scam
3:39pm Wednesday 3rd February 2010
Sunday was the last day for the online submission of income tax forms. So with this subject in the forefront of many people’s minds, the tax authorities put out a timely warning concerning an Internet scam in which people were told they were in line for a rebate, and thereby tricked into supplying the security details of the bank or credit card account into which it would allegedly be paid. In fact, of course, money would not be paid at all; instead, armed with all the information they needed, the fraudsters would simply empty the bank account or go on a spending spree until the card’s credit limit was reached.
Radio 2 stars ought to stay tuned in
3:38pm Wednesday 3rd February 2010
‘You don’t hear enough Alma Cogan on the radio,” Michael Ball told his Radio 2 audience on Sunday before playing the singer’s version of The Beatles’ Eight Days a Week. Afterwards, he said something else which implied this had been a very rare event.
Magnificent portraits are stars of the show
3:32pm Wednesday 3rd February 2010
The heads did it for me, at The Royal Academy’s magnificent exhibition, The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters. I loved the portraits, to the creation of which the artist himself attached the utmost importance. “What I am most passionate about, much more than all the rest in my profession – is the portrait, the modern portrait,” he wrote to his sister Willemien in 1890.
Vicky (and her sister?) ready to ride again
9:57am Thursday 28th January 2010
An invitation to a dinner at Gee’s is hardly to be resisted, especially when it comes from a young lady as delightful as Vicky Jewson (above). She is the enterprising filmmaker who, aged just 18, decided she was going to direct a full-length feature for the screen, and proceeded to do just that.
When finding cash proved very costly
9:55am Thursday 28th January 2010
Ihad the singular good fortune earlier in the week to find a £5 note as I cycled up the Cowley Road. Having picked it up, and with no obvious claimant in sight – what I first took to be one turned out to be a butcher’s shop mannekin – I put it in my pocket. It will be going to charity, of course.
Why I'm Still Dubious about the Michelin Man
9:54am Thursday 28th January 2010
The Michelin Guide awarded its highly coveted two-star restaurant rating to Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons in 1984 before it had served a single meal – a remarkable lapse from its much-vaunted standards that I noticed and at once exposed.
Why I'm still dubious about the Michelin Man
4:02pm Wednesday 27th January 2010
The Michelin Guide awarded its highly coveted two-star restaurant rating to Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons in 1984 before it had served a single meal – a remarkable lapse from its much-vaunted standards that I noticed and at once exposed.
Escape from the big freeze in Jamaica
3:49pm Wednesday 20th January 2010
We all know about Red Stripe lager which rivals rum as Jamaica’s national drink. But it was other brews that caught my eye on the shelves of supermarkets and bars on my first visit to the island last week.
Spectator book reviewer shoots himself in the foot
3:33pm Wednesday 6th January 2010
The practice of literary criticism can be hazardous to the reputation of a critic. This is especially the case for a critic who identifies ‘errors’ in the work under consideration that are not errors at all, or who makes silly blunders of his or her own in the course of a nit-picking review.
More tales of the top-notch
3:41pm Wednesday 6th January 2010
The concerns of this column are more than usually nobby today – and you don’t come much nobbier than James Douglas-Hamilton. Younger son of the Duke of Hamilton – to visit whom Rudolf Hess made his ill-fated wartime flight – he was born Lord James Douglas-Hamilton and later became the Earl of Selkirk before renouncing the peerage to remain an MP and thereby protect John Major’s slender Tory majority. A year later, when Major was defeated, the retiring prime minister returned Douglas-Hamilton to the Lords as a life peer. A lucky chap – in other circumstances, he would almost certainly have been removed from the Upper House in Labour’s cull of ‘hereditories’.
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