A pasturised goats cheese from Hertfordshire, bought from Neal’s Yard Dairy.
Childwickbury always makes me think of the moon; it’s a round of pure white, incredibly young cheese. It’s damp and crumbly, an adolescent creature existi[…]

One of the unfortunate results of having grown up in a world where MySpace existed while I was still underage* is that my previous internet selves occasionally rear their ugly heads and bite me. I had the revelation several years ago that I ought to […]

Tom Ewing joins Peter Baran and Roger Bozack in the broadcast booth for the simulcast of the championship match between Germany and Nigeria and gets raked over the coals about this year’s voting irregularities. Well, not so much raked as polite[…]

It took me a while to get the hang of my first kabuki show. A lot of it is very alien. The music is drums, very loud clappers and samisen, which sounds like an out-of-tune banjo, which is clearly my problem with their very different scales rather tha[…]

Ah controversy. So many people court you but when is the wedding? I have always found the ideas of religions advertising to be a bit odd*, though even I cannot help but smuggle a small smile when I think of cheap posters saying Carpenter Seeks Joiner[…]

There are a lot of stupid things that supermarkets do to food that upset me. Wrapping cucumbers is of course everyone’s least favourite example of stupidity at work and washing potatoes counts as a close second. Washing carrots unnecessarily, s[…]

Here we are, at last.

Here we stand at the summit of Pop Football achievement, looking back at 63 matches: some wonderful, some perplexing, some illuminating, very few boring. We’ve heard so much pop, enjoyed so many marvellous moments, and […]

At some point ages ago I tried to write a thing about comfort pop, after listening to ‘Fight For This Love’ 28674987 million times on repeat but ultimately, saying ‘some songs are quite pappily nice and occasionally necessary to ave[…]

There are no losers here. Each Pop World Cup manager set off on a crooked path some months ago, and to fall at the penultimate hurdle cannot be counted as shame. Rather, let’s doff our caps at the achievements of both these two. Carsmile Steve,[…]

Roger Bozack returns from his mysterious illness and joins Peter Baran in the broadcast booth as the crucible of this Pop World Cup gets amplified to the breaking point – tossed on the horns of a swelling tide and cast into a literal pressure c[…]