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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Blimey. Look who’s on the fifth floor
UPDATE: you might have noticed that the tweets, pics and stories from Aung San Suu Kyi’s visit promised in this post have gone, deleted when live blogging company Storify went…
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Bowblog is ten years old today
I adapted the name from Kevin Werbach’s Werblog, which seemed like a cool thing to do at the time. I’d been blogging for a few years before that (since the…
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Best job in Britain
Last week I used one of the days of ‘community leave’ the BBC gives me to spend the day interviewing candidates for deputy head at the junior school in Hertfordshire…
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I cold-called the man who invented the World Wide Web
1984. I’m well into my fourth ‘gap year’ (in fact, I’m redefining the term ‘gap’). I’m working at a telesales place in Queen’s Park. This telesales place is different from…
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Igor Stravinsky, Tupac Shakur and the uncanny
(a post from 2012, which is pretty uncanny in itself) The Player Piano was the Tupac Hologram of its day. — The most thrilling of our inventions are the ones…
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Noisy beds
I love a bed. I should leave it to a radio production expert to explain what I mean by a bed, but since I don’t have one to hand, a…
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You know, actual curation
Everyone’s going on about curation these days. We’re all curators now. But yesterday I witnessed some of the old-fashioned variety, the kind they do in art galleries, and I was…
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Total radio – six reasons BBC Radio 3’s ‘Spirit of Schubert’ was awesome
The ‘Spirit of Schubert’ finished a week ago. It was Radio 3’s biggest ‘takeover’ yet – over 200 hours of output devoted exclusively to the work of Franz Schubert. Every…
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What would I print if I had a Little Printer?
Some disagreement out there about what BERG’s Little Printer is for. I don’t have any special insight but I think it’s a charming and clever thing and I badly want…
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Not understanding Greece
UPDATE: April 2022. It’s kind of embarrassing reading this 11 year-old blog post now. It seems callous and ignorant. But then thinking about it, the post dates from before we…