Cummings through a squeeze.

It occurred to me this morning, as I lay awake in bed desperately trying to think of something to occur to me, that cave diving is insane. Not that it hadn’t occurred to me before. When I was revising for my GCSE’s I would manage to get myself distracted by almost anything: Junior Kick Start, […]

On gobbing on plods.

Spitting is on the rise, we are told. It takes a special kind of stupid to spit on another person. You’d have to agree it’s a pretty low thing to do, not to mention repulsive. I mean I guess if you’re an Anglo Saxon and you’ve just killed the Viking who torched your village and […]

A religious ramble.

I passed the notice board of one of our local churches the other day. Churches must have had a rough time lately: just when you might want them to comfort you and soothe your furrowed brow along comes something that they can’t explain and that doesn’t seem to appear in God’s guide to surviving stuff. […]

Reeling them out.

What is there worth writing about? Is there anything left that hasn’t already been said. Everyone is saying stuff all the time and now it’s just a wall of voices and none of them make any sense. It’s taken me a whole week to work out what the hell Boris Johnson has laid out for […]

Always worth remembering.

25 years ago yesterday, as they say, I was in Portsmouth. It was edging towards the end of my first year at university and that day marked 50 years since the long overdue demise of the Third Reich, a Reich notable for (amongst other things) thoroughly failing to last for a thousand years. That it […]

To The Beach Boys, with love.

The letter B is particularly ripe for recording artists. The Band, Black Sabbath, Blur, Bowie, father and son Buckley, Lindsey Buckingham, Bee Gees, Burt Bacharach, John Barry, James Brown, Black Keyes, Solomon Burke, Big Star, Harold Budd, Belle and Sebastian, Roy Buchanan, Be-Bop-Deluxe, The Byrds, Beck, The Beta Band, The Bloody Beatles. You can even […]

Tired of sharers. Sick of ‘experts’.

One of the most gruelling aspects of ‘the age of coronavirus’ is just how much people feel compelled to share. It was bad enough already with Facebook and Twitter and idiots like me pouring their thoughts and opinions out all over the place and making everything dirty. But now that we’re locked down and locked […]

Notes from the back line.

I’ve written nothing for over a week. This is not a good sign. I mean, I may be working from home but that doesn’t mean I should just put writing on the back burner altogether. I would like to be able to tell you what I do for a living but I doubt you’d be […]

Just forget about Yesterday.

This is the problem with not doing so much during the day. You get rusty, and though it hasn’t been ages since my last post it still feels like ages. This is also the problem with every day bleeding into the next until for all you know you’ve been living in a hole in the […]

The Coronavinyl Revival: The second half of The Rolling Stones.

I won’t be hurt if you don’t bother reading this. Among the handful of truly great books about popular music sits a collection of writing by Nick Kent, once the top of the food chain in British music journalism and a writer of rare talent. There are few to match him; Stanley Booth, maybe Lester […]