Month: February 2006

  • Testing humanity

    We’re very pro-cuddly creatures in our house. Some of our most treasured companions are very realistic fluffy bears, dogs, otters, giraffes, lions and so on and our favourite stories usually…

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  • Not a lot of people know this

    I have a tiny internal Julie Burchill living in my head, against whom I check all my ideas. — (UPDATE: this might be the NME article, but the text in…

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  • Questions questions

    I have many questions about Islam and those cartoons. I wish I could sit down with one of the young, apparently intelligent and obviously articulate spokesmen I see rolled out…

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  • An open letter (about the Schools White Paper) to grumpy Labour backbenchers

    Hello Guys, I’m pretty sure you won’t argue with me when I say that education is important to national competitiveness but I wonder if you’ll agree with me when I…

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  • Big, stupid cars

    If you do the school run in a Land Rover Discovery 3 you’re hauling fifty times your own weight with you (maybe twenty times the weight of your whole family).…

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  • The unlikeliest survivor

    How can one man be so irrelevant and yet, at the same time, so influential? How does John Prescott, a politician who belongs not to the last generation but to…

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  • Sort of Proustian, really

    Germolene used to be pink. It was famously pink. People used to call it ‘pink ointment’. For generations the distinctive colour and thick, putty-like texture defined the whole category. Everybody…

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  • Cameron again

    I schlepped down to Demos at London Bridge to watch David Cameron make an unimpressive speech in which he largely failed to convince his audience that a) Margaret Thatcher believed…

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