When I moved to the south of England five years ago, I didn’t realise that it would soon become my mission not just to defend my homeland but to repeatedly explain exactly where it is. I hadn’t thought about the fact that the British voting map divides as much by the north-south line as our […]
Listening to a podcast today on, of all things, the evolution of superhero films (don’t blame me, blame the French, who are capable of taking just about anything as a serious art form, and going into great detail about the psychoanalytical background to such texts), I was struck by a throwaway comment about how attitudes […]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33257415 I don’t tend to read BBC news: it’s a bit wishy washy, the epitome of dumbing down, failing to ask searching questions (or, from the looks of it, any questions) and way too fond of the over-simplistic bullet pointed list. But although I can dismiss and despise The Sun and the Daily Mail from […]
It was, in the nineties, suggested that Britain was moving towards a classless society. A few years ago I read an article in which the journalist set out to find someone who self-indentified as upper-class (even the landed aristocracy, it turns out, are ‘middle-class’, at least in their eyes). In 2013, the BBC announced that […]
I spent most of my youth protesting my hatred of Bob Dylan. Partly because, when I was young and fond of the kind of hyper-airbrushed, synthesised, poppy harmonies and energetic dancing of various manufactured bands, the Bobster’s nasally voice, irritating habit of making very long songs and the complete oddity of an organ thing every […]
This year is 100 years since the outbreak of the First World War. You probably didn’t need me to tell you that, since we’re not exactly allowed to forget. This war and it’s sequel, 25 years later, seem to have been stuck on the history curriculum ever since, as a reminder of how justified British […]
Yes, that’s right, Atticus, as in Atticus Finch. I know he’s fictional, and I don’t care. It was Atticus that was responsible for me wanting to be a lawyer, and it was him that made me realise, a few years later, that it wasn’t at all the career for me? Why? Because I was young […]
I set out one day with the good intention of listening to or reading the news every morning, determined to find out what had gone on while I had been sleeping and what world-changing thing event might happen on that particular day. The problem, I have come to realise, is that when listening to the […]
CakeonFridays 