The train to Hastings was packed. It was one of those sticky days when the air bristles with the threat of thunder and having to stand seems a super-human feat. Luckily, there was one seat left. I took it – expecting the large man next to it to redistribute his bulk to give me room. …
All the current debate about the sleazy Seventies has got me thinking about what it felt like to be a young girl then. In 1970, I was 14 but looked older. I had started my period when I was 10 and felt sexually mature — although I was far from it, not having progressed much …
29 Nov 2012 (Daily Telegraph Magazine) Ian Hislop is in the first-floor dining-room of the Coach and Horses, a defiantly unreconstructed pub in Soho, London, greeting his guests at the Private Eye lunch he has hosted for the past 26 years, ever since Richard Ingrams made the initially controversial decision to hand over the editorship …
Old at heart: Richard Ingrams Ginny Dougary August 2012 FT MAGAZINE The man who was one of the founding fathers of Private Eye, as well as its editor for 23 years, had arranged to meet me ostensibly to discuss the 20th anniversary of his “new” magazine The Oldie and my journey to Aldworth, where he …
Why do so many teenage girls play up to the slutty, binge-drinking image promoted by lads’ mags? Whatever happened to hard-won feminism? It was a column last year by Rosie Boycott, the writer and broadcaster, that first sounded an alarm bell. She was reeling from having read Nuts, one of the younger lads mags (read …
When Titian-haired Ginny Dougary wrote a choral piece celebrating redheads, it brought home to her how much ‘gingerism’ there is in England. Click here to listen to Ginger Chorale by Ginny Dougary and MJ Paranzino, performed at the Royal Festival Hall, June 2007 Photo courtesy Red and Proud The e-mails from the choir built up …
Dear New Lot of Terrorists, I thank you for showing me the light and changing my life. Truly, you have liberated me in ways you could never have foreseen. No longer will my heart feel heavy and my spirit be freighted with dread as I wait for the plane to touch down at JFK or …