11 Jul 2026

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 […]

3 Jun 2026

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 […]

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 […]


  • Dyke kicks Sky into touch

    A great rift has opened up between the BBC and Sky and more than a decade of servitude is over. The BBC will, from the end of May, broadcast its…

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  • Cheer up, it might never happen…

    Dave Birch, who should know, on the coming collision of wireless networks, GPS and RFID tags in The Guardian. Dave’s pretty level headed about the implications but I’m sure that…

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  • Lovely prints

    Thanks to the excellent Kookymojo for this link to a fascinating site about Iris fine art (‘giclee‘) printers. I have one of Michael Light’s gorgeous black & white moon prints…

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  • For the record…

    You’ll have read this in dozens of places already (like, for instance, The Hollywood Reporter and The Bristol Evening Post) but I thought I ought to mark the really quite…

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  • Business idea

    Movies are distributed to cinemas via satellite (or even the Internet) these days, right? I mean, I assume trucking cans of celluloid around the country is more or less finished…

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  • Beats ‘win a year’s supply of Lion Bars’

    You can enter a competition in this week’s New Scientist to have your mitochondrial DNA sequenced. This is one of those mind-bogglingly 21st Century things that we now take utterly…

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  • Butterfly about to emerge

    I learn from The Guardian that Richard Wilson’s Butterfly is nearly finished and this Sunday evening at 7.00 he’ll be talking about it (among other things) in a panel discussion…

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  • Thompson grills Lessig

    Bill Thompson’s interview with Lawrence Lessig in The Guardian. Weirdly, I watched Bill record this interview and here’s a pic to prove it… Bill is on the left.

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  • Domestic dilemma

    Billie is painting, Olly is at a friend’s house for tea, Juliet is waiting in an interminable queue at Watford General Hospital to see her consultant (our third baby is…

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  • POD at HUP

    I’ll say this slowly. You may now buy print-on-demand books from Harvard University Press. They’ve made a list of 100 out-of-print classics available to be bought one at a time.…

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  • Guardian.jpgTotal Information Washout

    This week’s Bowbrick at Large in The Guardian is about the broken dreams of the Internet advertising business. For about ten minutes back in what we’ll one day remember as…

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  • Alien!

    Juliet’s latest column at Tigerchild is up. This week, with seven weeks until the birth of our third child, she’s having a G.E. Kane moment.

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