TOM UTLEY: How’s a poor bloke to know if offering his seat to a woman is still chivalrous?

Oh dear, it was most ungentlemanly of me to laugh. But I couldn’t suppress a chuckle over the video showing Ursula von der Leyen, President of the EU Commission, quietly fuming at this week’s summit in Turkey after two caddish males bagged the only available chairs. Indeed, I suspect I was very far from alone in … Read more

TOM UTLEY: Tracking elderly motorists is a sinister road to go down

From the point of view of everyone’s safety — not least her own — it really would have been much better if my dear late mother had been banned from driving long before she approached her 80th year. Though she would hotly deny it if she were still alive, the fact is that throughout her life … Read more

TOM UTLEY: Scrap the theatre interval? It’s the only bit old soaks like me really enjoy 

Here’s an embarrassing confession — and I fear that I’ll never be admitted to polite society again once it’s out in the open: reader, I’m not at all keen on live theatre. Indeed, my heart used to sink before the lockdown on those mercifully rare occasions when kind friends would ring to say they had … Read more

TOM UTLEY: My granddaughter wailed as though I was Freddy Krueger when I babysat after lockdown 

The other day I had the joy of meeting our eight-month-old granddaughter for the first time since she was a very new baby indeed. Well, I say it was a joy — and it was certainly a relief to see her and her three-year-old brother after so long — but I’m sorry to report little Etta … Read more

TOM UTLEY: Why I fear we’re losing all sense of money in our pocket 

Don’t ask me if Rishi Sunak has struck the right balance between borrowing lashings more money to keep the economy from total collapse and increasing taxes to pay some of it back in the far distant future. I freely admit that I’ve never begun to understand economics (which is one thing I seem to have in … Read more

TOM UTLEY: I’ve found sanity ironing underwear in lockdown but if pubs don’t open soon I’ll go potty

Good old Kirstie Allsopp is right. Ironing tea towels really is a therapeutic experience — and God knows we could all do with more of those in these trying times. Indeed, I flatter myself that I write with a degree of authority, since I’m something of an obsessive ironer myself. What’s more, as long-suffering readers … Read more

TOM UTLEY: My pooch Minnie, her lost dog tag and proof that most people really are kind 

My heart rather sank when a letter arrived at our home this week, addressed in capital letters to ‘MINNIE THE DOG’. It’s an occupational hazard of my trade as a columnist that, from time to time, I receive anonymous abuse and even the occasional death threat through the post at the Mail’s head office in Kensington. … Read more

TOM UTLEY: No wonder fewer students want arts degrees

My brilliant late father, who would have turned 100 this week had he lived, was fond of delivering mock-pompous Johnsonian pronouncements (no, not that Johnson; I mean Samuel, of dictionary fame). Three in particular stick in my mind. The first was his reaction when I passed my 11-Plus, after I told him that school friends who’d … Read more

TOM UTLEY: Here’s the proof young ‘uns have senior moments too

Once in a while, even in these grim times, there comes a snippet of news to lift the most downtrodden heart. Such a morsel of cheer lifted mine this week, with the evidence in yesterday’s paper that young people have no business to sneer at us old folk when we suffer the occasional senior moment. For … Read more