29 Jul 2025

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. […]

13 Jan 2025

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 […]

6 Sep 2024

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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    Billie, 4, made this at school today. What is it? No idea. I’ll ask her in the morning and let you know (click the small pic for a bigger one).…

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  • Nix the upgrade

    I was sort of idly thinking of upgrading the teeny tiny hard drive in Juliet’s original, Blueberry iBook (too small even to upgrade to Panther, now) but then I read…

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  • Out of his box

    This is the kind of thing those insrutable Finns were after when they abducted Matt Jones and sequestered him in their arctic circle underground think-o-tron. I think it’s quite a…

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  • Gaming eMusic

    Here’s a good game. See how many albums you can get within your 40 track per month download limit over at eMusic. It hadn’t occurred to me, of course, but…

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  • A new standard for online news?

    So I’ve been living with The Guardian’s Digital Edition for a few weeks and I’m even more convinced. It really is the first good analogue for a real newspaper I’ve…

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  • Still repulsive after all these years

    The Fall were a kind of mysterious, twitchy, paranoid fixture at the edge of my early adult life – at least once I’d sold all those Genesis albums. I’ve got…

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  • Davies gets his retaliation in first

    Meaty and coherent preemptive strike from BBC Chairman Gavyn Davies on Hutton (although last minute delays to the report may make it a bit more preemptive than intended). You’ll need…

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  • George W Bush makes good decisions

    Listen, I don’t mean that they’re all good (or even that many of them are), I mean that he just made two big ones that practically gave me goose bumps…

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  • The trouble with getting old

    If you’ve got an ft.com subscription you should read Martin Wolf’s article about population and pension provision from 6 Jan. He nicely lays out the main issues (with charts) and…

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  • Best book this Xmas

    We’re huge fans of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler round here. Their The Gruffalo is one of our favourite picture books and was turned into the best bit of children’s…

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  • A proper innovation from The Guardian

    I’ve finally got around to trying The Guardian’s digital edition and I’ve got to tell you it is absolutely brilliant. In fact, I think it might be the first proper…

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  • Polly Pocket lesbians

    I’m getting a lot of pornospam from a web site called tinylesbians.com (I don’t want to link – it’ll only encourage them). I’m reluctant to actually visit the site in…

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