You’d think that “Wanna Be Startin Somethin” would be the ideal way to open a movie about Michael Jackson. In This Is It, though — patched together from four or five rehearsals for the 50-concert extravaganza which famously ne[…]

Having worked around Covent Garden from the middle of 2002 I’d walked past the Newton Arms loads of times (not least on the way to Parker Place where the original Club FreakyTrigger was held) , but always thought it looked a bit, y’know, […]

Saw New Moon tonight. Survived the emoness of the film, though was disappointed by the halfhearted emo-ness of the soundtrack. Yes Death Cab For Cutie, yes Lykke Li, and how you managed to get proto-emo Thom Yorke on the soundtrack I don’t know[…]

My first M R James story was Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook, which is also the first in the book. I talk about it at some length here, and most of the way through it I have to confront the issue that I did not find it very scary as a ghost story. So now[…]

Whatever happened to this series? Work happened, and continues to happen. This is the crunch time for about three seperate projects, with a fourth waiting in the wings. Expect forward progress on TMIGEM to be glacial, two a week or less – but i[…]

Flower Marie
Soft, white-rinded, raw-milk sheep cheese, from Sussex, bought from Neal’s Yard Dairy
Flower Marie comes in little brick-like squares. The rind is white with gentle pink tinge, and adorably soft and velvety-furred and strokeable &#[…]

It’s an all too common problem for the modern web surfer. There you are, browsing the internet, when suddenly you encounter a blog post informing you of the death of hip-hop. Shock! Horror! Why were you not informed?! Can it be so? While our ow[…]

There is a sequence in Werner Herzog’s Encounters At The End Of The World, where we see the Camp McMurdo safety training procedure. There is a large proportion of it that involves people wearing buckets (which the recruits have painted happy sm[…]

Walking past Disney Place through twirling snowflakes that melt on your nose and eyelashes, there’s a childlike magic in the air – it’s the last day of school! Er, I mean, work.
The last Friday before Christmas is of course Demob Da[…]

Pubs can offer many excellent things, as are being amply revealed in our Pubs of the 00s series. However, culinary invention is rarely one of them. Even self-proclaimed gastropubs rarely get further than putting ‘twists’ on the standard p[…]