- Blog
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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 demented. The poems they treasured – stirring, descriptive, romantic – have fallen out of fashion. Poetry book sales are at an all time low. Various…
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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 for at least another year of office. I’ve been blithely (and largely unconsciously, I think) dismissing each new crisis – each new horrifying misstep more…
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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 BBC’s kids’ channel want everyone to send in photographs of their pets. Since the only pet we own is a goldfish (Fishy, or ‘Fishy Malishy…
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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 Century landowner newsletters (like The Times) and steam-powered, 19th Century, industrial-era organs of the modern (like The Guardian). If you look very closely you can…
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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 to this brilliant edition – presented by Charles Wheeler – about the USS Nautilus’ quite amazing voyage under the North Pole in 1958 if you…
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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 and 19th Century Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, with The Economist’s Tom Standage in attendance.
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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, of which you will soon, I’m sure, be made aware). I’m not doing that any more, though. I’m working – in a glittering tower in…
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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 feature a talking duck or a hungry caterpillar or something. We’re also generally down on unmotivated cruelty to animals – we don’t support the squashing…
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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 the scan’s too small to read. It’s from 25 October 1980) Really. She’s a tough critic too – I don’t think she’s actually liked an…