WHOEVER designed Istanbul airport must have been inspired by the phrase: ‘Walk that extra mile’. Passengers have to walk over endless travelators until they reach the immigration counters. Turkey admits only the fittest.
The extra exercise would have been less exacting, had one not spent 10 days treading the unyielding pavements of London. Fortunately, like the food there, the weather has changed. Gone the sooty smog of childhood, the Spartan meals, the lockdown on Sundays, the after-effects even into the mid-1950s of wartime rationing.
Today’s London is a vast epicurean table, with cuisine from every kitchen: Greek, Ethiopian, Indonesian, even Mexican chipotles. Reverse colonialism has conquered Britain. The Vikings brought power; the Romans civics and law; the colonies brought curries.
Khushwant Singh would have been delighted to learn that the final day of his KSLF 2024 ended in Cambridge. He loved Britain as only a foreigner can — with a recurring, unrequited, one-sided passion.
Ethnicity is no longer a novelty in Britain.
A speaker in Cambridge (a Brit-Pak professor of English at Bristol University) introduced her unforgiving diatribe against her father. It was patricide in print. Her father had been a professor of........