Highlights
Nearly half a bicycle
The atomic theory in Kilburn — This place (on Kilburn High Road) has been morphing steadily from dry cleaner’s to bike shop over the last few years. I remember being surprised one morning to see a few kids’ bikes lined up for sale outside but I’d say the shop is now approaching 50% bike shop. […]
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 […]
Some bullet-points about regulation
In case you’d got the wrong idea about how the ’regulatory state‘ is supposed to work — UPDATED 23 May 2025. I could update this thing daily. Regulation is always a news story in the UK (Search any news service for ‘regulation‘ right now and you’ll get a long list of current news stories about […]
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What is our problem with entrepreneurship?
I wrote a piece for the supplement that accompanied The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit last week: What is an entrepreneur? “A person who organizes and operates a business or businesses,…
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Rupert Murdoch wants me to move
To America, in fact…
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Small pleasures
Tea, in a small polystyrene cup, on the way to work, from Mr Patel’s paper stall on platform 1 at Radlett station.
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What are you going to do about poetry?
Poetry’s a drug on the market. You can’t move the stuff. No one reads it any more. The people who learnt it by heart at school are all dead or…
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I’ve been in denial
I’ve been sort of vaguely expecting that Tony Blair’s troubles would fade with the arrival of the warm weather and that, by conference time, he’d be secure again and ready…
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Goldfish and Beavers
So here’s why I was late for work Tuesday. I was photographing the goldfish. My 7 year-old son rushed into the kitchen to tell me that those morons on the…
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Some centre-left reading for you
The thing about Britain’s big newspapers, the ones we call broadsheets (although they come in all sorts of sizes these days), is that they belong to two groups: pre-industrial, 18th…
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Under the ice
The Archive Hour is one of those Radio 4 programmes that really ought to have a decent… erm… archive. Since it doesn’t and since you won’t be able to listen…
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Google on Radio 4
Jonathan Freedland’s excellent The Long View maintains no archive and isn’t part of the Beeb’s podcasting trial so here’s the latest episode – a terrific parallel reading of 21st Google…
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Commuting again
As some of you know, I’ve been at home for a while now, developing a detailed understanding of my children’s appalling table manners (and helping my wife start a business,…
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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…