THE FT TOP 100 SONGS
84. Pulp – “Babies”
The genius of “Babies” is that the harder you try to make sense of the story the less sense the song seems to make: and the more you think about the song the less the story matter[…]

What I Did In The Holidays
Well, I’ve now held a copy in my hand so I’m finally prepared to believe it really exists. Not sure when the official publication date is (tomorrow according to the publisher, “not yet” according to[…]

Defaced
I’ve always been in two minds (ha ha Janus-faced) about writing in books. On the one hand I’m suspicious of the fetishism of trying to keep a page clean, rather than treating a book as a machine for thinking (and for living, which[…]

Expect to see more of this sort of story in years to come, illustrating our (human? Western? European? British? (not just pedantry, it matters!!)) propensity to dramatise change in terms of ending, disaster. Key quote = “New research shows that[…]

Are Tomatoes Too Wet? Obviously this question is nonsense as it stands (a philosopher writes) since a tomato is as wet as a tomato is wet. I suppose what I really mean is, are tomatoes too wet to put in sandwiches? Admittedly, this had never struck m[…]

Popjustice suggests multi-format bonanza as the best way to shift copies of a new Band Aid single. But with the line-up face-off currently being between ‘credible’ bands like Coldplay (i.e. music for cunts) and pop bands (i.e. music for p[…]

FREAKY TRIGGER TOP 25 SCARIEST THINGS
14: Being Alone For The Last Third Of Your Life
The month of fear has started me thinking about my life. As these things sometimes do. I realised that I spend much of my life afraid, in tiny, almost insignificant[…]

On the way to the gym (to go for today’s hat-trick of tedious anecdotes) at about 7.20 in the morning, I pass three pubs which are open (is this unusual? It seems so to me), and which almost always have folk drinking in them. I also pass two sa[…]

Gym Life
Everytime I throw up, I think of Julia Kristeva. (This sentence is not, luckily, reversible.) All down to an encounter with her description of the abject at an impressionable age. By way of comparison, in five months of going to the gym, I f[…]

TV without the words
About four times a week I go to the gym on my way to work. In the gym I use various machines. Many of them face towards a row of large TV screens, which hang from the ceiling. These TV screens show a variety of channels, usually […]