As drivers desert the city I find myself clinging more and more to my father’s belief that a man without a car is not really a man.
GILES CORENAs drivers desert the city I find myself clinging more and more to my father’s belief that a man without a car is not really a man.
GILES CORENPeople think you get paid millions by the BBC if you’re famous, but me? Me, I’m in the Premier Inn in Gillingham.
GILES CORENBut still I can never shake the feeling that buses are somehow beneath me. Which is why I have a rule regarding their use: I never, ever run for one. And nor should you.
GILES CORENOf course you can get a decent mouthful of food in New York. You can get a decent mouthful of food in Nairobi.
GILES CORENWhen I tell people I spent almost a year in Paris, I know they imagine something out of a Woody Allen movie, which it wasn’t, of course. I was just working in a clothes shop, but I was aware that it was exciting.
GILES CORENPeople like me make modern life intolerable.
GILES CORENThere is nothing wrong with getting a bus. Nothing in any way demeaning about boarding a huge smelly communal vehicle that will rumble noisily and very slowly in the vague direction of the place you need to get to and then dump you half a mile away in the freezing wind and rain.
GILES CORENWe built walls around them with slits through which to fire arrows at scary, cross-eyed rural people, and brought our food and family inside because they were the safest places to be.
GILES CORENI used to be a very angry person, I used to throw things and break them. Then I had five years of constant psycho-analysis, and I don’t get angry any more.
GILES CORENWhere my dad taught me everything about writing, Graham Paterson, who gave me my first job at The Times, taught me everything about journalism, which is that it’s no big deal, and it’s more important to have a glass of wine.
GILES CORENWhen I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.
GILES CORENI have quite good general knowledge and I had a very drilled education from an early age. I do know more than most people.
GILES CORENBeing a success in the world, having total control of one’s life, is about being able to take or leave things.
GILES CORENAs a broadly left-wing, environmentally aware urban believer in anthropogenic global warming, I am all for a total ban on motor vehicles.
GILES CORENMy dad Alan loved Westerns and we watched them together when there wasn’t much else on TV. I had toy cowboys I’d call Richard Widmark or Gregory Peck and we’d restage the Battle of the Alamo.
GILES CORENI’m just a bit frustrated that in London we make such an effort to ape the New York restaurant scene. I have good friends who ape the New York restaurant scene and do it brilliantly. None of them would claim that the primary reason for going to their restaurant was the food.
GILES COREN