Celebrity chefs are a curious breed and, if current TV schedules are to be believed, as much of a national obssession as house prices and the vaguries of the Portuguese justice system. For example, anyone plonked in front of the electric fishtank in the past few weeks will have been treated to Jamie Oliver rustling up some scran in his ( Read more... )

I recently dedicated a little time on here to the works of William Shakespeare and that has found me, completely by accident, surfing on the crest of the zeitgeist. You see, earlier this week a gaggle of scientists, scholars and clever folk, curiously led by Sir Derek Jacobi, claimed that there is no way a 16th century commoner like The Bard could ( Read more... )

The recent commemorations of the 10th anniversary of Diana's death have led to the general concensus that the monarchy was nearly obliterated completely in that surreal first week of September 1997. National feeling towards them swelled into a tidal wave of resentment at their apparent coldness towards the death of the 'People's Princess'- despite ( Read more... )

Here's a conversation from the late eighties that probably never happened but I like to imagine it did ( Read more... )

The Cold War is on it's way back, apparently. After recent renewed interest in The Smiths and the worrying trend of women wearing ankle warmers, Vladimir Putin is continuing the eighties revival by perpetuating suspicion between Moscow and the West and threatening to point nukes at Europe. Some say its all part of a ploy to display The Kremlin as ( Read more... )

I've been back from Glastonbury for a couple of weeks now and yet, for someone who periodically turns up here to spout some sort of semi-coherent cobblers about whatever they can think of, an outpouring on the subject has been proving hard to come by ( Read more... )

Working in WH Smiths does open one's eyes to a few of the prevelant phenomena of Britain in 2007. The fact that chip-and-pin sits as comfortably with pensioners as drum-and-bass or vodka Red Bulls is one, as is the revelation that a large section of the youth community are capable of browsing through shops wearing shoes with wheels in the soles. ( Read more... )

I'd like to think that, as internet blogs go, mine is a rather chipper effort. This isn't really much of an achievement, if I do say so myself, as a cursory glance at the outpourings of most online scribes would suggest that they're a bunch of joyless individuals who could suck all the fun from an episode of 'Monkey' filmed on a bouncy castle. ( Read more... )

I'm blessed. Truly, I am. God has smiled on me in a number of ways and two of them strike me as particularly important although, until recently, they've been rather unappreciated ( Read more... )

A curious set of circumstances far too complex to go into here saw me sit down this evening to watch Saturday night terrestrial TV for the first time in months, if not years. And Jesus Trampolining Christ, if you're one of the people who actually sluices this stuff through your cereberal cortex once in while you have my sincerest sympathies ( Read more... )