To get a sense of the real news, of stories which have not been efficiently shaped and varnished for public consumption by the metropolitan media, it is often a good idea to read local papers. There, the apparently small events of everyday life can contain more real significance and truth than the latest well-spun policy… Continue reading What’s green about cutting recycling?
Read moreThere are moments in one’s life when a powerful curiosity about family origins begins to niggle. An urge to talk to older relations about interestingly eccentric great aunts is one symptom of this malaise; researching one’s family tree on the internet is another. Ancestors rarely live up to expectations. When Michael Parkinson was dropped from… Continue reading The secrets in your surname
Read moreThe local council has produced a largely, brightly-coloured sticker reading ‘SLOW DOWN IN OUR VILLAGE’ for all residents to stick on their wheelie-bins. Almost all of them have, so that once week anyone driving in the area will have this bossy imperative nagging at them from every doorstep. Is this what the Tories are calling… Continue reading The Big (Whingeing) Society
Read moreAlmost certainly, the good burghers of Dudley in the West Midlands will have used the word “inappropriate” when discussing whether they should allow Philip Ridley’s play Moonfleece to be performed at the town’s theatre. When they banned it, the reasoning was that the play’s themes of homophobia, fascism and the BNP were not “suitable for… Continue reading Nobody has the right to be spared offence
Read moreThe heartbreaking spectacle of civil servants stumbling around in the darkness with their trousers around their ankles has been evoked by a news story from Birmingham. Aiming to save energy – and presumably to cut down on lazy staff taking long loo breaks – those running the West Midlands government offices have installed a timer… Continue reading Flushing out energy-wasters
Read moreThese days, I awake thinking of the strangest things: sheikhs, fat women, primitive men, sad old bastards with guitars. In less than two weeks’ time, on Sunday 18th April, I return to the King’s Head Theatre, Islington, in the company of the finger-picking guitarist Derek Hewitson and the funny, brilliant Victoria Hart. Our show Taboo-Be-Do!… Continue reading If it’s politically incorrect and musical, I’m interested
Read moreThere have been some frankly unhelpful comments following the launch this week of the UK Space Agency. Some people have even suggested that it is little more than another pointless government initiative – Planet Quango, a less-than-heavenly body, mainly consisting of inert gas. “Space is money,” Lord Mandelson is reported to have said, but there… Continue reading Space is the place for blue-sky thinking
Read moreThe door to the children’s room, to be found on the home page of this site, can now be opened. It leads to pages relating to my children’s books – pages which have been so superlatively designed by Joyce Serrano, under the project managership of my son Xan, that I now worry whether the books… Continue reading Beware of Herbert the Rat
Read moreWith Mr and Mrs Cameron, Mr and Mrs Clegg and Mr and Mrs Brown lining up with their kiddies as competing models of perfect, well-scrubbed domestic contentment, it has been a good moment to receive a sharp lesson in reality from the past. Michael Foot and his wife Jill Craigie were not quite as trim… Continue reading A grown-up lesson on marriage
Read moreFollowing the great debate about the deployment of the word “retard” by Vinnie Jones on Celebrity Big Brother, more words seem about to appear on the list of words which must not be used in respectable company. In this week’s Time Out, the columnist Michael Hodges has been to task for using the word “loony”… Continue reading Another triumph for the language police
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