Columns
View From The House: Cheryl Gillan
Posted by Julie Voyce on October 13, 2007 10:30 AM
Much as I love the landscape of the Chilterns, it cannot be denied that we do not have a sea coast!
So for a few days at least it is good to be at the seaside for the party conference season.
Whether the sea breezes will disperse the heat of “election fever”, or intensify the symptoms, you should know by the time this column is printed.
That said, it was good to see old friends and fellow delegates away from our home ground and to hear their responses to what was being said by shadow ministers.
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All In His Head: Sean O'Hare
Posted by Julie Voyce on October 2, 2007 5:51 PM
ONE of the members of Blake, the recently formed, classically-trained boy band, was having a birthday party in The Coopers Arms, Cheslea, last Saturday. It was a joint bash with a university friend who used to live with Prince William in St Andrews and has beautiful bee-stung lips. They are both dashing, suave gents who look like they have been brought up on the best of cheese boards followed by larks in the field with chocolate-coloured labradors. Between them they have 1350 friends on Facebook.
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Working Mum's Diary: Chene Koscielny
Posted by Julie Voyce on September 23, 2007 4:24 PM
Every birthday, Christmas and Mother's Day, my well-meaning husband presents me with a novel or book by a well-respected author about some thought- provoking subject.
And so, if you were invited to a dinner party at mine and you had a moment to study the contents of the bookshelf in the living room, you would suspect that I am a literary connoisseur - some-one who knows their Amis from their McEwan. You could expect me to wax lyrically about the meaning of life in a Proust-inspired way, analyse intelligently the historical origins of Islam or argue passionately about the merits of the Booker prize.
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All In His Head: Sean O'Hare
Posted by Julie Voyce on September 23, 2007 12:22 PM
Sean O'Hare
BIG weekend for me, the one just gone. A dear friend of mine, Sotirios, organised a dinner party on my behalf and invited a girl that I've had trouble dismissing from my thoughts for the last year or so. An immensely bright guy, Sotirios. He studied economics at St Andrews, Oxford and Cambridge and now wears square framed glasses and works for a private investment bank. He has a sharp, analytical mind and always thinks at least five steps ahead.
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All in his Head: Sean O'Hare
Posted by Julie Voyce on September 11, 2007 12:16 PM
Sean O'Hare
I'VE got a nickname, his name is Billy. He's the little prat I turn into when I've had upwards of five pints and my eyes glaze over. Some nights he overpowers me and charges out of his box like a tramp pestered by a wasp. Other nights I find myself coaxing him out. As a result, he doesn't know where he stands. The truth is, I can't make my mind up whether I like him or not.
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All in his Head: Sean O'Hare
Posted by Julie Voyce on September 3, 2007 2:43 PM
I was initially going to write about Climate Camp at Heathrow and how I sat on a hay bale in the organic beer tent listening to reggae surrounded by girls stroking Alsatians with their bare feet, but that was before lunchtime on Thursday.
Popping out to Mr Crusty's sandwich bar in Chalfont St Peter I found myself behind Donny Tourette, the ex-Celebrity Big Brother contestant-cum-punk rock star who escaped over the House wall with the help of a bunk-up from Leo Sayer. What larks.
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View From the House: Dominic Grieve
Posted by Julie Voyce on September 3, 2007 11:41 AM
Although most school pupils are enjoying a well-earned rest, the summer can be an anxious time for those waiting for exam results. I am not sure that I would have wanted to receive my results by text message, but some pupils in Scotland have chosen this method.
Let’s wish "Good luck" to all who are waiting for those results and let us recognise how hard most of them have worked towards their goals.
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Working Mum's Diary: Chene Koscielny
Posted by Julie Voyce on September 3, 2007 11:38 AM
WE are in the last gasp of a terminally-ill summer with the end of the school holidays mercifully in sight. What better way to while away a few hours with activity-starved children than to head down to the leisure centre pool? Or so you would think.
I phone a fellow mum whom I suspect would be keen to step out from behind her ironing board and escape the constant nagging for attention, snacks and Cbeebies.
Let’s face it, when you’re a non-celebrity mum racing towards your forties, you don’t readily volunteer to parade around in your bathing suit in full public view.
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All In His Head: Sean O'Hare
Posted by Julie Voyce on August 26, 2007 10:04 AM
TWO FACTS for you: 1) The house in which I have grown up in is to be bulldozed to make way for Heathrow Airport's expansion. 2) I missed out on Glastonbury this year.
For these two reasons I decided to head down to the Climate Camp, a temporary, sustainable settlement just north of Heathrow, made up of protesters, green peace activists, the odd mongrel dog, undercover police, and soon-to-be-homeless residents urgently familiarising themselves with the four walls of a canvas tent.
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All In His Head: Sean O'Hare
Posted by Julie Voyce on August 14, 2007 10:06 AM
Sean O'Hare
"I was sitting in the corner with my bag of marijuana, I wanted to get higher so I set myself on fire." These were the famous lyrics sung by the 'fast set' or rather the 'slow set' at my school who would repair to the ditch at break and return to class with smoke clinging to their blazers and silly grins on their faces. The 'silly grins' bit, I hasten to add, was nothing to do with what they were smoking - they always had silly grins on their faces. Considering the lyrics , in light of recent scientific evidence proving the drug's capacity to send smokers loco, they were ironically prophetic.
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All In His Head: Sean O'Hare
Posted by Julie Voyce on August 9, 2007 4:44 PM
WOKE up on Saturday morning in a double bed next to an Iraki girl, an Old Harrovian and a financial analyst with a lisp, in that order. Nothing untoward, just uni friends. We're a close-knit bunch, us lot. A bit like the Larkin Family in The Darling Buds of May. We all have fry-ups and cups of tea together in the bath.
In an ideal world we would have woken simultaneously, chillaxed in the flat and considered our options for the day ahead. A glance at Old Harrovian's bedside clock, however, instantly put the mockers on any chance of me doing any chillaxing.
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View From The House: Dominic Grieve
Posted by Julie Voyce on August 4, 2007 12:08 PM
Dominic Grieve, MP for Beaconsfield, writes:
THERE are some things which people seem either to love or to hate: reality TV shows, rice pudding, begonias, wheelie bins…
The collection of domestic, non-recyclable waste, once a fortnight, is something which has caused concern to individual constituents and which has been the subject of sustained media campaigns.
MPs on the Communities and Local Government Select Committee decided to scrutinise these concerns. After all, as they said in their final report, every household is entitled to a domestic waste collection and everyone has an opinion on how the collection should be carried out.
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All In His Head: Sean O'Hare
Posted by Julie Voyce on August 1, 2007 7:44 PM
IF I could have asked George Best one question and barred him from hitting me or giving the answer "more drink", it would have been: How do you deal with post-lash depression, George? For there is nothing truer than the saying: What goes up must come down. Like a cowboy builder with a spirit level, I spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday trying to find that internal equilibrium after a particularly ruinous weekend. Drink is a great servant but a poor master, and not for the first time, I allowed it to call the shots. Come Sunday evening I knew only too well where I was heading.
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Working Mum's Diary: Chene Koscielny
Posted by Julie Voyce on July 27, 2007 1:26 PM
EVERY now and then I suffer a parenting panic attack. It has nothing to do with guilt about how my working will scar my children psychologically, or whether they would have been geniuses if I hadn’t had the odd glass of wine during pregnancy.
I don’t wake up in a sweat imagining my five-year old daughter smashed off her face with the wrong crowd or picturing the three-year-old having an ASBO slapped on him for breaking into cars. (Although I probably should be worried in his case – he almost hotwired my car with the tennis club keys the other day.)
No, the fear that grips me with such force as to make me choke in my glass of Chardonnay, is the terrifying thought that I don’t have a life – beyond being a mum.
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All In His Head: Sean O'Hare
Posted by Julie Voyce on July 20, 2007 5:31 PM
THE lucky woman who gets to marry me will have to pass this test: I will take her to a smallholding in Spain that I will either own or rent depending on my fortunes as a journalist.
Anyway, I will tell her I own it. Scrub that, I mustn't lie to her in case she is the one. If she sleeps on the plane on the way over, she must not dribble, and if she stays awake, she must not catch me dribbling.
Engrossed in games of Paper, Scissor, Stone in the back of the taxi, we will arrive before we know it, in what will be a dusty, rural village with not an Englishman in sight. We shall unpack in my modest, clean villa before I take her to the garden where I will keep two rescue donkeys tied to a tree. One donkey will be considerably bigger than the other.
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