I drank a beer last Friday that tasted like cold, weak, black tea. This delighted me as I rather like tea like that. Others were not quite so taken by its flavour. Perhaps the word beer primed their tastebuds too much. (I cannot unfortunately remembe[…]

Delovely has a problem at its core, which scuppers the whole biographical process. Cole Porter’s songs were not autobiographical. Generally they were written for musicals, where the songs helped tell the story, a story which was quite unlike hi[…]

I’ll be the first person to say that the world was not clamouring for Terminator 3. My reason oddly appears to be different to most, since I always thought that Terminator 2: Judgement Day was a bit – well – shit. Superfluous to the streaml[…]

The school what banned conkers for fear on nut allergy its nuts itself (or conkers-bonkers). I won’t invoke PC craziness*, rather the idea that a rogue bit may fly through the air and cause anaphalactic shock is so statistically unlikely that i[…]

Mike Basset England Manager was not what you might called a sophisticated satire. The set-up being that pretty awful Norwich City manager Bassett becomes surprise pick for England manager when no-one else wanted to do the job. That much was true in 2[…]

Code 46 is a futuristic law which says that due to the massive rise in in vitro births and other shenanigans, we must not have children with people who share our genetic code. Its anti-incest because that half the people on the planet may have simila[…]

One of my local pubs is being refurbed. I am rather nervous about it. Whilst not a regular haunt, I rather liked thShaftesbury, its cheap beer, lovely Sunday lunches and the like. What it will become I am not sure, there is genuine gutting going on t[…]

FT TOP 100 FILMS
20: ELECTION
Martin Skidmore says:
I’m astonished that director Alexander Payne has attracted quite a lot of criticism from some quarters for picking on particular targets and being cruel about them – Kathy Bates’s […]

A List Of Films from 2003
How to write about what I thought were the best forty films of last year. No, scratch that, why am I writing about the forty best films of last year? The simplest answer of course would be that I did it last year and am a co[…]

This mornings epic battle of Dave Boyle vs Victoria Derbyshire on Five Live was foiled mainly by London traffic (we assume). Nevertheless if argument success is based on the amount the host flirts with the guest, then Dave won hands down. To be fair […]