It is the ultimate hippie nightmare. The Grateful Dead, a band which for 30 years represented the cause of love, peace and LSD, is about to provide marketing lessons for 2010. Their fans, who liked to be known as Deadheads, once offered a stoned, smiling defiance of that all-purpose authority figure of the straight world,… Continue reading Time to herald the wisdom of chickens
Read moreEven coming from the weird and wacked-out world of Tinseltown, the news that Sean Penn is to appear in a Hollywood biopic of Maxwell Perkins is somewhat startling. Perkins was a mild, courteous, self-effacing publisher’s editor. He was, admittedly, such a brilliant editor that he has been a touchstone of quality and seriousness for those… Continue reading Stand by for the new Hollywood hero – the publisher…
Read moreAnyone looking for a happy, escapist view of recession and unemployment should skip along to the Vaudeville Theatre in London where a revival of Neil Simon’s 1971 play The Prisoner of Second Avenue has just opened. The storyline may be wafer-thin but there are one or two quite good jokes in the play, and excellent… Continue reading The recesssion turns us into new people
Read moreHere’s a song I wrote recently for the brilliant Victoria Hart, called ‘It’s Only Love That Gets Me’, receiving its world premiere last weekend. The recorded version can be heard on the Something Happened MySpace page.
Read moreA few days ago, I rang a friend whose recent emails had suggested that he was in low spirits. There had been health problems, a career disappointment. After a couple of minutes of small talk, he asked politely: “To what do I owe this pleasure?” Rather than admit that I was merely calling for a… Continue reading The limits of modern friendship
Read moreThe dog was barking. It was an unusual bark – simultaneously excited and frustrated, different in timbre from her usual head-down-a-rabbit-hole bark, or her trying-to-climb-a-tree-after-a-squirrel bark, or her I’m-the-queen-of-the-castle guard-dog bark. I investigated. She was dancing like a demented show-pony around something she had found. Her prey was immobile, small and circular. It was a… Continue reading Of hedgehogs and attack dogs
Read moreAnyone looking for a handy all-purposemetaphor for the mood of Britain in the early 21st century has only to look around them. It will be there in the plastic sandwich-container on a train seat, in the swirl of fast-food wrapping and discarded newspapers on the pavement, in the empty beer cans and plastic bags that… Continue reading Detritus fit for a society of hypocrites
Read moreA man who took modesty to pathological extremes, the late Willie Donaldson used to explain why, for several years, he was employed to write a column in this newspaper. Every paper needs a column which no one actually reads, he said. It serves a useful double purpose, making other writers look good and providing readers… Continue reading A job for the elite, not the incompetent
Read moreWhen Norwich was said to be favourite in the race to be the UK’s first City of Culture, I wrote a blog which was not entirely supportive of my local city. “How the heart sinks. As the region’s mighty cohort of arts administrators and creativity facilitators prepare their power-point and pitches, sharpening up the requisite… Continue reading Forget Normal-for-Norfolk and Essex Girl – it’s time for East Anglian Man to be recognised
Read moreIn the jolly rough-and-tumble of column-writing, getting few hard kicks from readers is part of the game, but I am beginning to wonder whether something rather odd has been happening in the scrum since the election. My columns in the Independent often earn me bit of heckling – usually online, invariably anonymous – from readers.… Continue reading The new tribalism of the left
Read more
