- Blog
-
Bowbrick Country
How did I manage to live in Stevenage (Saxon settlement and blighted Sixties new town) between the ages of seven and twenty without ever learning that E.M. Forster wrote Howards End there and that they call the country to the North of the town Forster Country? In the Seventies, when I was growing up there,…
-
A christmas present
My wife bought me a set of those affirmation cards for Xmas. Or, at least, I think that’s what they are…
-
Radio comedy genius
One word: Ed Reardon (OK, two words). The best radio comedy in years. A suffering artist at the end of his tether. Beautifully observed, nicely judged comic pathos. Nothing cute or redemptive. A twenty-first century Hancock. Brilliant.
-
Can we have some snow please?
Just a little bit (enough to justify the purchase of three lovely, old wooden sledges for instance). We’re ready and waiting. My kids are watching the special weather forecasts like hawks, we live in approximately the right bit of the country (over in the next county they’re snowed in) and we have a stack of…
-
Nifty OSX photo stitcher
I’m having fun with a nicely put-together OS X photo stitcher called Double Take. The Soho hat shop pic is made from three originals stitched together – can you see the join? I’m really in awe of the quality and completeness of the kind of OS X shareware/freeware I’ve been downloading lately – and this…
-
Another Radio 4 fan
Russell (or ‘Mr Davies’ as I feel obliged to call him since his book came out) has been playing with Squidoo.com and has come up with a Radio 4 lens – a page of links to programmes and series he likes. A worthy enterprise.
-
Tree story
Some really evocative sounds – mostly squelching and chopping, actually – in this lovely Open Country programme on Radio 4 about the astonishing natural and social history of the Oak tree. The producers of the show have gone to the trouble of securing a proper archive for their past programmes so there’s a pretty good…
-
God versus Santa…
As far as my kids are concerned, I believe in Father Christmas but not in God. Over the years, since they started to ask, I’ve spent a fair amount of time constructing complicated responses to various God questions: “no. I don’t believe in God but I think the stories about God and Jesus are important…
-
Big bang
We live quite close to the big fire at Buncefield fuel depot (from the top of our village you can see the flames). Like everyone, I’m amazed that so few people were hurt but I find myself thinking about the poor sods who were right there, on site, at 6 O’Clock on Sunday morning. Britain’s…
-
On the buses
The Routemasters are like jellied eels or Hawksmoor Churches or those people who swim in the ponds on Hampstead Heath. They’re eccentric and they say something about London’s weirdness and complexity and also its attachment to worn-out ideas and things. History tells us we won’t miss the old buses as much as we think we…