We met a couple of friendly students in Warsaw who guided us through the station. I talked about football with one of them – a personal milestone for me, and my diligent readings of FourFourTwo‘s pre-chewed football history articles stood[…]

FAUNA OF POLAND: MY GUIDE
“We have no rabbits in Poland” said our guide gravely as Isabel enthused over our pets back home (thriving, thanks for asking). Despite this obvious flaw the country boasts a rich natural fauna as follows.
WILD B[…]

Cheap Food I Love (Polish Special): BIGOS
The guidebooks struggled to say much about Bialystok. A large Eastern Polish town, the last big place before the relative wilds of Belarus, it carries itself half like a seedy frontier outpost and half like a[…]

Where, I was asking a few weeks ago, is a new ‘Careless Whisper’ going to come from? Where is the next ‘True’? All the current pop generation like their ballads – they love the opportunity to show off all those neat vocal tr[…]

TOM’S TOP TWELVE (Part 2) (As Promised) (Before the big pre-honeymoon decks-clearing pop roundup) (Now where were we…)
A-TEENS – “Upside Down”: I now suspect it was just a kind of wilful perversity that stopped me liking[…]

Another Mysterious Brand: except this one I do like. Tastes like nothing else, has heroically resisted the tides of ‘brand expansion’, has never IIRC changed its packaging, and you never see adverts for it. Every time I see it I’m d[…]

Life’s Cruel Lottery: related to Dave’s anguish below – brands that refuse to die! I reached for a can of coke this morning as I picked up my paper, but the newsagent was temporarily out. Of Cherry Coke, however, there was no end. Y[…]

“They’re just trying to shock.” This seems to be a bogus criticism of art in the first place (can you tell its Turner season again?) – shock is an exciting reaction to have, it leads to thought and discourse more directly than[…]

Pop’s Romo Roots!: this fansite to production and songwriting team Xenomania (Sugababes, Girls Aloud, Dannii, Abs, assorted others) has a couple of very intriguing entries – Xenomania started off as remixers of choice to the Romo ‘a[…]

Fantastic though his mishearing is, the word Mark’s looking for is “countline”. But what does “countline” mean? (It refers to pretty much all bar-type or tube-type chocolate and sweets) I’ve vaguely assumed the &#8[…]