It was a nice day and a nice meal (a wedding supper), but does someone teach caterers to write like this, and if so, does it affect how and what they think to cook?
To start: Basil crust chicken Caesar salad with grain mustard croutons
To follow: Sea[…]

Memorably grim nightspots #1: a double birthday celebration, maybe five years back, at the Troy Club in Hanway Street, and one of the birthdays – we didn’t know this till we got there – was the landlady’s. OK, you’ve rea[…]

It was a documentary called “In Search of Atlantis” and it was on Channel 5, and if I say, Yes but look, it featured Alexander Nehamas as a talking head!!, you might still probably insist I was being ironic and a faux populist re my C5 do[…]

There’s a lot of lame Hornboid detritus silted up round the idea of the mix-tape, all the more urgent to clear up for its being half-true, or worse. A letter from a convalescent friend put me in mind to make some, and send them to her: the task[…]

Two weeks in a row I’ve worked out who the perp was in Law & Order: SVU about 45 minutes before the (none-too-likeable) detectives did. This is very boring – why didn’t they watch Cannon as kids? That’s where I learnt to […]

I work for an org that publishes a magazine and runs a gallery, and fairly often the former runs articles on work featured in the latter. Maybe it’s just because I love magazines so so so much that I quite often find I prefer the (yes v.high-st[…]

I learnt to swim at Shrewsbury baths when it was still an old Victorian pool, all red brick and high windows and cool shadow. In maybe 1970, they knocked that down and built a modern glass palace, a lot bigger, with seats for spectators and a champio[…]

OK, I know that my continuing attempts to map prog rock onto old-skool pre-thatch socialism have truth in them somewhere, bcz the idea maddens the right idiots – but yes, I also know it doesn’t quite fly yet really. It was nice thinking […]

Over nearly 20 years I’ve stopped off countless times on the way out of town back to Hackney at Wing Lee Loi in the Essex Road. It used to do Polynesian as well as Chinese, and when I was very first there it had a plaque on the wall about the c[…]

Caldeirada de Lulas!! Talitha brought me squid stew in a tin for tea on Thursday, and it was the best thing ever, just spread on thick bread. Like a sardine tin, where you peel the metal top back. She got it in a shop called Lisboa, somewhere in West[…]