19 SEPTEMBER 1987, page 57

Low Life

Publicans' holiday Jeffrey Bernard T here's a splendid woman who is the landlady of a good pub in Islington and who always has something a little odd to tell me when I drop in......

Home Life

Birthday blues Alice Thomas Ellis I mostly forget anniversaries — or I try to. Too many are sorrowful and the others are a nuisance, necessitating awful, ghast- ly, boring......