So it’s that time of year again, Open House Weekend is upon us, time to dust off the A-Z and look inside buildings you never knew were there in the first place.
Here are my top five tips for Open House:
1. Think of it as an excuse to see a bi[…]

I caught an edition of Eureka yesterday morning on BBC2 in which a younger, less assured Ferne Cotton and a Scottish lass who I vaguely recognised, tried to convince us they knew about science. This was particularly unconvincing re Ms Cotton, who is […]

This summers two big bad taste(-ish) sex comedies(-ish) appear to have helped create an all new genre. At least they think they have. The 40 Year Old Virgin and The Wedding Crashers are happily vulgar comedies, which switch (usually uncomfortably) in[…]

A few weeks ago a copy of the first ever biography of Belle And Sebastian landed on the FT doormat. The FT doormat gave it to me, and I decided that I would use my extensive contacts amongst reformed members of the feared Sinister ‘massive&#821[…]

Inventor fuels car with dead cats
“this practice is outlawed in Germany”. Killjoy.Presumably this was outlawed under a generic law that would have made Simon Bond’s hi-hi-hilarious books also illegal. The more specific “und di[…]

The shortlist is a bit disheartening. Simple as that. It makes you wonder if the judges really tried with the longlist or actually just went for the names they knew. The presence of the Ishiguro suggests so (it is a terrible book). Of course if we kn[…]

This is revisionism. Tiswas custard* pies were totally non-diary products (good for the allergic amongst us). They were rubbish 1970s shaving foam, without any balms, aloe, pro-vitamin Cell Block H or dry weave top sheets.
And if you don’t bel[…]

The premise behind the film The Aristocrats is that about 100 comedians all tell the same joke. It is not a very good joke. However it is a joke where the middle section is basically just a long scatalogical trawl through whatever the teller thinks w[…]

I don’t mean false memory syndrome as in the therapy definition. A dangerous buzzword: it allows the defense that childhood memories of abuse have been implanted by “predatory” psychologists. Could this happen? Well certainly, and w[…]

Not THIS custard pie madness, obv. Seeing Jeremy Clarkson getting humiliated in public is clearly on of the finer things in life. Nevertheless the sad thing is that custard pies are not what they were. In as much as once upon a time they were more th[…]