Home Views & Blogs Columnists Laura Davis

A magical land consigned to childhood memory

IT’S the fans I remember best, with giant fins that hummed as they whirled, spinning coffee-scented air up our passive nostrils. Read

New kind of calm as Mr Branson leaves me in a real pickle

I HAVE decided to look on the bright side. This is because a colleague, in a slightly hypocritical fashion, it has to be said, suggested that I am a moaner. Read

I never have time on my hands - or even on my wrist

"HAVE you got the time?" asked a man on the street before dashing haphazardly away like a bumblebee on speed. Read

Looking a little closer to home for holiday ideas

BARELY a few days of sunshine and the countdown to the great escape has begun. Read

Always up for a challenge – so long as it’s cheap

HERE’S the quandary: how easy is it to find something to do that you have never done before without there being a very good reason (phobias, morality, maintaining public decency . . .) for you never having attempted it? Read

The world as we know it has gone all granny scooter

WHAT fresh hell is this? Flowers losing their fragrance, Jerusalem being banned from churches and the Bognor Birdmen grounded. Read

A self-writing column would make life perfect

ROLL up, roll up. Feast your eyes on this – it’s a spectacle worthy of a PT Barnum circus, as perfectly formed as General Tom Thumb, and it could be even more lucrative than the Fiji Mermaid. Read

Insomnia brings out the absurd in all of us

‘WHY do undertakers have a preference for yellow cars?” I wonder during the early hours of the morning, after awakening from fitful sleep for the umpteenth time since I had gone to bed the night before. Read

Harking back to Wordsworth’s days in the Lakes

ON PARTICULARLY busy days, a colleague takes a moment to read missives from the Little Cube of Calm to restore office serenity. Read

There are times when I wish I didn’t know him so well

THERE has been a tune going incessantly round and round in my head like an odd sock stuck in a perpetually turning washing machine somewhere in the caverns of Hell. Read

My life’s just not miserable enough to write a book

I HAVE a confession to make. It is simply that I have no confession to make. Read

Why doesn’t the ageing process affect everyone?

‘I DON’T believe it,” insisted a friend in the tones of Victor Meldrew, with the certainty of a medieval abbot proclaiming the flatness of the Earth. Read

Teen angst can become a dodgy celebrity obsession

THE celebrity poster is a teenage bedroom staple, especially if it comes with tiny holes across the middle where it has been pulled from a magazine and traces of regular goodnight kisses at the worn patch on the lips. Read

I go weak at the knees for a well-turned phrase

‘LAURA, old bean,” hollered a colleague from his position safely out of elastic band firing range from my desk. “There’s something wrong with the Goggle.” Read

Write on, it seems the love letter is not yet dead

EN GARDE, you techno geeks and email aficionados, there’s a battle of words going on and you just might not win. Read

Never mind aliens – do we understand our message?

SOMEWHERE in deep space, beyond the farthest point you can spy through the largest telescope on Earth, a bug-eyed alien is considering his lot. Read

If only I had realised then how easy things were

A VERY bad thing has happened. Not as serious as Rhydian’s revelation that he is dating a woman 12 years his senior, perhaps, but pretty important just the same. Read

The past is a foreign country – but great for a day trip

I HAVE a friend with a bit of a thing for the 1940s. By the third glass of wine, she would twist her hair into a victory roll and reminisce about the delights of gala pie, despite being born more than two decades after the Potsdam Agreement. Read

Time well spent but not necessarily worth repeating

THIRTY is the new 20, said one of my friends recently in the middle of planning a weekend of rope swinging, parachute jumping and gorge scaling to mark the impending end of her twenties, or is that teens? Read

It’s my party, and I’ll do what I want to

WOULD I rather be Jackie Kennedy or Laura Bush, I wonder briefly, as the event of my year looms ambiguously on the horizon. Read