This is a mantra I must take up full time. I have eaten three risottos out in restaurants in the last month, and been disappointed by all of them. My weekend savoury rice pudding experiment was at Branca, an Italian restaurant in Oxford. A smoked had[…]

Oh, and Hitch is the first Hollywood film to really rip-off The Office, in as much as it shows Hollywood has discovered just how funny bad dancing can be. And that is a dead horse flogged over most of the credits (where we also get to experience how […]

Love, Sex and Watching (Love and Sex*)
The tagline of Kinsey is “Let’s talk about sex”. And they do. Zoologically. Kinsey is one of those films you can admire rather than love. It is stuffed to the gills with interesting facts, figures […]

Country Glamour: great title, great concept – “Country music sits with you at the bar while you down crap beer and wallow in your own misery. People who say “I like everything except country” are also, conveniently, the stupid[…]

Serendipity in the West Midlands
The discovery of art in the provinces is my 2005 ambition. Fuelled by finding a gallery devoted to GF Watts in a small Surrey village, I’ve started looking elsewhere for small-town galleries. So I went to Walsal[…]

Giant Drinks
I’m a sucker for giant size drinks. They make me feel like I’m in the pub version of Mr.Greedy.* At an gimmicky Austrian restaurant in West London last year I enjoyed myself with one-litre steins, in Tampere I had the opportu[…]

New Kitkat Bar
Released on 7th March. It’s full of mango and passionfruit and I’m not sure what to make of it. The taste is confusing. It reminds me of the first time I watched the Crying Game and said, “phoar, wouldn’t mind a[…]

Credit where credits due.
Apparently I was quoted in The Times on Saturday (a dull tedious work thing). But they spelt my name wrong. Of course this is a nice way of discrediting the august paper of record for not fact checking (and I did spell my na[…]

The special effect occupies a unique space, albeit an almost always pre-defined one which is rarely deviated from.
Unlike other constructions of illusion and artifice, the job of the SFX maestro is never to actually trick. Their job is ostensibly to […]

Who knows the secrets of the giant squid? Nobody! Well, nobody knows all of them – nobody really knows how big they can get or much about their life cycles and habits way down in the ocean murk. What we know about them comes mostly from their c[…]