Highlights
Count Binface and electoral theatre
Don’t be a costumed loon — It’s trivially easy to stand for Parliament in the UK. Any loon can do so. You need ten electors to nominate you and £500 for a deposit – and it’s actually been getting easier. The deposit was introduced in 1918 (£150 – quite a lot of money then). Before […]
I hate this
But does it matter? — I don’t usually say that sort of thing here. I try to be more measured, less personal. I’m talking about the police face recognition vans obviously. This might not surprise you: I mean that I don’t like them. I’m an old git after all, a man who’s written here before […]
Where is my patriotism?
Come, love of country, fill my heart… — I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured the place I live and not disgraced it or undermined it (I support England and GB in sporting events – I fly a little flag […]
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Still angry really
What’s frustrating about Blair’s culpable ineptitude in the last fortnight or so is that it favours principally the Old Labour rump of maybe 50 bitter and increasingly vocal old-timers. Gordon…
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Londony things
I drove, on the afternoon of yesterday’s catastrophic elections, across a large slice of North and East London, from suburban Hertfordshire to Stratford in the East End and then –…
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New Yorky things
Nice feature about The New Yorker from Naomi Gryn on Radio 4 the other day and, if you can still get it, you should pick up Metropolis Magazine’s April issue…
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Artists at work
This morning two men came to my house and, with something I can’t call anything but grace, delivered a piano. Watching Sean and his mate from Elstree Piano Removals moving…
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Umlauts. What are they good for?
Moben, a Manchester company that makes fitted kitchens, has been going around with an umlaut over the ‘o’ since 1977 but a few years ago someone (who exactly?) managed to…
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Clarke: you’re a lightweight. You’re fired
Ask any leader, anyone who’s ever led anything. Sometimes you have to fire someone. Sometimes you have to fire them even if it doesn’t really make any sense to do…
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My life as an author
Josette Garcia is O’Reilly‘s UK Press Office – and before that she worked for another, significantly less groovy, tech publisher. She worked there, in fact, when I got my first…
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Warning –
very long sentence aboutvery boring topicStephen Newton, a Manchester PR guru, correctly points out (in a comment) that my long reply to Nicola Stanbridge’s long but slightly off-the-point reply to my long (and witheringly to-the-point)…
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My reply to that BBC reporter
Hi Nicola, Thanks for your thoughtful response. I don’t want to sound like an obsessive or a copyright geek but I think ownership of intellectual property is important in modern…