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This week
Just now, I got the news that Pauline Campbell has killed herself. I met her a few years ago when I was writing about how many women in prison kill themselves (a frightening, disgraceful number). Pauline's daughter Sarah killed herself in Styal prison in 2002, having ingested 100 tablets from the meds trolley. Since then, Pauline has done ( Read more... ) -
Bike
So someone else has been crushed by an HGV near my home. Skipping red lights is sometimes safer and sometimes not. Cycling is sometimes safe and usually not. Yesterday I was merrily cycling to London Fields Lido for a swim (and soon cycled away again, as it was packed with fair-weather sunbather-swimmers), when a parks services van turned into the ( Read more... ) -
Nicolas
Sacre bleu, Sarko really is a buffoon, n'est ce pas? You couldn't make him up.
And by the way, why hasn't there been a French state visit for 12 years? -
I'm a bad white
From the normally humourless pages of the New York Times, a review of a new film about a cute kid having a not-too-bad Mexican emigrant experience, in which the best lines are the ones you don't normally read at the end:
“Under the Same Moon” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has bad white people, hard-working brown people and morally ( Read more... ) -
Facts
The publishing industry has been in trouble recently for publishing yet more blindingly obviously made-up memoirs which could have been fact-checked with a phone call or two. Trouble is, as I have discovered, publishers do not pay for fact-checking. They do not include it in their schedule, and they don't request it at any point in the (long and so ( Read more... )
