It’s been the slow burn, underground sensation of the summer, if you’d care to look at it that way. People have been going bananas about it. Or going ape, if you’ll indulge me. It’s never quite been top flight headline news but it’s always been there, flitting about along the perimeter, poking its head up […]

Read More Poxy Monkeys.

I love ice. I don’t think I’ve ever told it, but I do. For me it is one of the absolute fundamentals of domestic existence. A freezer without a bag of ice is, for me, of no more use than a kettle without water or a cigarette without a lighter. And for quite some time […]

Read More For The Love Of Ice.

If you ever find yourself having a decent reason to go to Aylesbury you might want to start re-thinking your life. At any given moment in time there must be worse places to be on the planet – the toilet block of a Nicaraguan jail, a sewage plant on the outskirts of Cairo, sticky-stuck and […]

Read More On Aylesbury.

I am now officially 46. Closer to 50 than to 40, as some birthday philosophers would put it, though since we have yet to master time travel it seems rather redundant to put that into words; it really isn’t that clever an observation. Nor does it matter. In the unlikely and quite cruel scenario that […]

Read More A Lovely Day.

Apparently mindfulness isn’t working with the teenagers. A load of clever people have gone into schools around Britain and asked a load of teenagers if they have found even the slightest bit of benefit from being ‘taught’ mindfulness, and most of those crazy kids have said no. You may think that any negative response from […]

Read More Mind Those Teenagers.

Note to reader: please excuse the last version – it’s really not like that! I woke up this morning with two options for the day ahead: Pride or Wimbledon. Both, of course, would require me getting into London and that didn’t particularly appeal. To be honest I don’t have any reason at all to join […]

Read More Wimbledon’t.

So, it finally landed, and it’s nearly finally all over. The Platinum Jubilee is coating the country in thick swirls of patriotic icing. It’s so thick you could smear it on the walls and make patterns in it with your finger, as Bobby Sands might have done in a dark corner of The Maze. Only […]

Read More Bubbly Jubbly Wubbly.

I nearly hit a squirrel this morning. It hadn’t occurred to me that the car in front of me and the van in front of that were swerving for any other reason than because they were dreadful drivers, but there it was, the squirrel, no, a squirrel, being all squirrely and dying a squirrelsome death. […]

Read More Animal magic?

In a couple of weeks’ time this great nation will be reaching out to tickle new heights of national pride and glory. It can reach all it wants but it won’t get anywhere like that far. As things currently stand this great nation is exhausted, up on bricks, fever dreaming and using both hands and […]

Read More Platinum Crap.

It has been over three weeks since my last post. It’s my fault entirely. Sorry. I’d love to tell you that I’ve used the time wisely, but I can’t do that. I think I’ve spent quite a bit of it lost in some form or other. And most literally in the supermarket. I finally know […]

Read More Lost In The Supermarket.