The Senior

The Senior "Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” – P.J. O’Rourke

“Some men see things as they are, and say why, I dream of things that never were, and say why not.” (Attributed to) Bobb...
06/09/2026

“Some men see things as they are, and say why, I dream of things that never were, and say why not.” (Attributed to) Bobby Kennedy

Fitting words from the pages of my copy of W.P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe” (the original novella which was the basis for ‘Field of Dreams’

Last week I flew in and out of Lyon–Saint-Exupéry.To a reader, is there a more romantic-sounding airport in the world? Y...
05/09/2026

Last week I flew in and out of Lyon–Saint-Exupéry.

To a reader, is there a more romantic-sounding airport in the world? You can’t help but imagine freedom, the limitless boundaries of flight. The almost blinding light of the sun and the endless horizon revealing itself above sleepy grey towns. The beauty of watching the outstretched wings of your plane’s shadow climbing and descending effortlessly over the dunes of the desert. That peculiar freedom that comes from being suspended, aloft for a moment, between where you have been and where you are hoping to arrive.

Well, you don’t need to have read many books to know that no airport can live up to that name. After three hours waiting for a flight, any romantic notion I may have had had crash-landed like Icarus.

Fresh photos of the same old scenes from Geneva this week. Wanting to write specifically about yet another return visit ...
04/09/2026

Fresh photos of the same old scenes from Geneva this week. Wanting to write specifically about yet another return visit to Brasserie de l’Hôtel-de-Ville (a place I think I’ve been eating at for almost a decade) I thought I’d check back on old posts. What I wanted to make a point of is how the modern world - and Instagram might be the worst representation of it - seems somehow fixated with discovery and prioritizes what is new. We speak so often about discovery as though permanence is merely a failure to keep up. Doing so however, I realised I think I may have already said what I wanted to say, but that perhaps there’s something appropriate in that too - a caption from last year:

“...I think that if I look back far enough I’ve posted photos (probably better ones) of these same views from a past visit. Within these walls, little has changed, and I think that’s why I try to go back every time. So much of what I love about restaurants, perhaps even life, is present here. I don’t care for what’s fashionable. I love the places that stay as they were, that seem to resist any overriding appeal for the new.
It makes no claim to be the best restaurant, and like your mother’s kitchen that’s part of its charm. The food is as it always was — good value, steady, never setting out to overwhelm or wildly impress. The staff similarly too... In a time when everything is constantly updated, reimagined, rebranded [and supposedly improved] I find myself drawn to what refuses to change and is just familial. Compared to that, excellence is vastly overrated.
To return is to witness some sense of permanence, a reminder that not all things must be the best, new or modernised to have worth and that, in fact, true worth comes from the opposite. It’s that satisfaction of sitting where you once sat, of tasting something familiar, and looking upon those things which will be there long after you leave for the last time. That the greater pleasure isn’t in fresh new discovery but in enjoying those same venues that might still feed your children one day if only there is justice in the world.”

Hemingway’s ‘one true sentence’, Dieter Rams ‘less is more’ I think every hero I’ve ever had believed in simple, honest ...
30/08/2026

Hemingway’s ‘one true sentence’, Dieter Rams ‘less is more’ I think every hero I’ve ever had believed in simple, honest things. Perhaps that’s why I love a maxim. Here are a few of my favourites (in no particular order):

- You learn from what you endure, never from what you achieve.
- What is worn holds more truth than what is new.
- The best men are never those who are the best dressed.
- You won’t get to use even a tiny percentage of what you learn. You learn however that that’s not the point of learning.
- You can spend years becoming someone, only to realise you preferred who you were before.
- Work can give you purpose. It can also give you somewhere to hide.
- You can perform a life so well you forget you’re performing it.
- Some things you don’t get to make right.
- Nothing that lasts does so unblemished.
- Some weights you carry become part of how you stand.
- You can spend years preparing for a moment that has already passed.
- The real answers come after the question has gone.
- You don’t always get closure. Sometimes you just get distance.
- You can’t beg to be treated with respect.
- You’ll always need a Plan C.
- You don’t have to act like those you think of as heroes (in fact maybe it’s better that you don’t) but you do need to be sure that you act differently to those you think of as enemies.
- Always keep your word. Not because reputation provides glamour - but because when it can provide leverage.
- Let the work shape you, not define you.
- Love fully. And expect to fail.
- Read the right books.
- If you think your time is important then do the obvious thing and buy an expensive watch. If you think people are important then spend your money and time more wisely.
- The hard conversations you avoid don’t disappear. They just continue forever until spoken aloud.
- If you don’t think you can change the past, you haven’t lived through enough of it. What you remember isn’t a fixed record of what happened: You forget, you edit, you focus on different things that happened and will learn to see them differently as time goes on.

(Redford - just because it’s coming up to the anniversary of his death and he always seemed to embody integrity itself).

You get to the point in your life eventually when you realise that you can go down the road and get lost somewhere in al...
29/08/2026

You get to the point in your life eventually when you realise that you can go down the road and get lost somewhere in all that s**t — French press, AeroPress, Mokapot, Blue Mountain, grind your own Yirgacheffe — but that all you really wanted was the taste of drip coffee poured from a BUNN in any diner in America.

Woke up and went for a run at dawn this morning listening to Waits’ ‘Closing Time’ - the best album for that time of the morning as everything in town began to look like a Sunday morning painted by Hopper. I had the dog walked and was in Tesco buying fruit to top pancakes for the kids by seven. Home, showered and a few years of Cheever read before anyone else was awake. Bliss.

“My Dad keeps a record collection in cardboard boxes lined up along his bedroom wall collecting New Mexican dust. His pr...
28/08/2026

“My Dad keeps a record collection in cardboard boxes lined up along his bedroom wall collecting New Mexican dust. His prize is an original Al Jolson 78 with the jacket taped and even the tape is ripped. Last time I saw him he tried to bribe me into taking it back to LA and selling it for a bundle. He’s convinced it’s worth at least a grand. Maybe more, depending on the market. He says he’s lost touch with the market these days.
My Dad has a picture of a Spanish señorita covered in whip cream pinned above the sink on his kitchen wall. My Dad actually does. He walked me over to it and we both stared at it for a while.
“She’s supposed to be naked under there, but I’ll bet she’s wearing something,” he said…
My Dad lives alone on the desert. He says he doesn’t fit with people.

4/79
Santa Fe, New Mexico” — ‘Motel Chronicles’ Sam Shepard

After watching a very long Spiderman (right to the post-credits scene), the Madrid season opener (decided on a last minu...
23/08/2026

After watching a very long Spiderman (right to the post-credits scene), the Madrid season opener (decided on a last minute goal), the boxing at 5AM (which went the distance), going to my parents for a typically epic Sunday roast (with the customary three puddings and a few bottles of Medoc), I somehow still made it home for the Yankees day game.

“We know the reasons some do not love baseball. It’s a slow game with lots of meetings, lots of standing around, lots of aimless jogging on and off the field…
Baseball has no slam dunks, no breakaways, and little violence. There is no goal and no goal line, no basket, and no finish line. There are no blocked shots, no blindside hits, no blocked punts, no electrifying runs, no alley-oop passes, no kick saves, and no bicycle kicks.
Baseball does have math, though. Lots of math.
“You made me love baseball,” Lisa tells Bart on The Simpsons. “Not as a collection of numbers but as an unpredictable, passionate game beaten in excitement only by every other sport.”
With all that, why do we love baseball?
I asked around.
“I love baseball,” Willie Mays said, “because it’s a game you can play every day.”
“For me,” Bryce Harper said, “I think it just began by being able to go out with my family, enjoy a game of catch. There was nothing better than going out on a Saturday and hanging out and smelling the weather and the fresh-cut grass, crack of the bat, and you’re dreaming...”
One fan told me about his first baseball game-not the action on the field but the feeling of climbing up the stairs from the concourse and seeing the stadium open up to him. The colors of the sky and grass and dirt and seats overwhelmed him and stayed with him. He said it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
Is that a direct answer? No.
Does it explain why we love baseball? Absolutely it does.”

Not just because I was quoting the Duke’s dress code, but for years I’ve said that a man can’t drink a martini in a T-sh...
21/08/2026

Not just because I was quoting the Duke’s dress code, but for years I’ve said that a man can’t drink a martini in a T-shirt: That cocktails, by their aspirational names and nature, are about belief. That there’s not enough faith in a man wearing a T-shirt to allow the transubstantiation of even ice-cold gin and vermouth into anything but a full glass of alcohol.

Friend, fellow Gibson-drinker, and one of the truly great restaurateurs Russell Norman once referred to me as “The Man Who Doesn’t Own a T-Shirt.” Perhaps it was the martinis I’d consume in his presence, but I can’t recall whether that was after or before I told him what I thought of trying to consume a martini whilst wearing one. It doesn’t matter, the reality is that we all say things purely for effect. The best of those maxims however contain a kernel of truth. The simplest here is that unless there’s air-con present it’s hard to enjoy a truly good martini peak summer. Perhaps that’s why the heat this year has even had me remove my tie and withered my once daily martini habit on the vine. Since my holiday however I’ve been re-reading a lot of Cheever. Naturally, as I think we can all remember, the martinis that come out of the pen of Cheever are something else. Of course it speaks of the alcoholism, but characters in Cheever can enjoy a martini on the beach (and not in the way that James Salter and Peter Matthiessen were known to do after an icy dip in the winter sea). ‘The Swimmer’ which I loved long before I even considered martini attire doesn’t even deign to wear a T-shirt.

The truth is that the martini can be many things: As we know from his step-son, that other great martini-aficionado E. B. White could happily consume his from a Thermos—a thought that might make anyone who took my T-shirt line seriously shudder. That’s the trouble with rules: Eventually you begin to confuse the thing itself with the conditions you have decided are necessary for it to exist. A martini may benefit from a collar, a tie, from air-conditioning, from the right glass, the right hour and a sense of ceremony, but as E. B. White, drinking his from a Thermos suggests, faith—true faith—is a portable thing.

Couldn’t drive through Maine without a visit to L.L. Bean
16/08/2026

Couldn’t drive through Maine without a visit to L.L. Bean

Spent most of the day sorting the whole cellar in 70%+ humidity. After my second shower of the day I decided to relax a ...
16/08/2026

Spent most of the day sorting the whole cellar in 70%+ humidity. After my second shower of the day I decided to relax a little and go through the remaining holiday photos. Some okay shots from Hyannis and Hyannis Port. We were supposed to go to Martha’s Vineyard on one of our days on the Cape but our ferry from Nantucket was cancelled because of the wind. It wasn’t all bad as it meant that we could all enjoy a long lunch at Spanky’s Clam Shack and I got to try the steamer clams.

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