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,[…]

A beer-washed, paprika-covered spiced cows milk cheese from France, bought from Une Normande a Londres.
Boulette d’Avesnes is also known as suppositoire du diable – you can translate that yourself. It’s a pointed, conical little rou[…]

photo by Ewan-M
The Royal Oak is wonderful because it is such a perfect example of an ordinary pub. It does nothing extraordinary or alarming. It is a Proper Pub, with small rooms and nicely mismatched furniture, and random plates and pictures on t[…]

Given the demise of glastoweatherwatch and glastofestivalforecast and no obviously googleable replacement by some other person with too much time on their hands, I’ve been having to look myself at the assorted forecasts, to see if we can predic[…]

The big story of this Pop World Cup, it’s been said, has been the exceptional performance of the African teams. Almost half of the quarter finalists, fully half of the semi-finalists, all drawn from Africa. Only one can make it into the final, […]

Touching distance, now. It’s the semi-finals and, of all the matches in the Pop World Cup, the semi-finals are the most tense. The stakes feel high: win, and you’ll soon savour the feeling of running out in the biggest pop football game o[…]

As anticipation begins to build for the football world cup, the pop version approaches its climax. Thirty-two teams arrived in South Africa: only four remain. We’ll be bringing you the semi-finals next week – let’s have a look at th[…]

I read about Mexicana over on this here cheese blog. and I thought that;

it looked like congealed vomit
it looked disgusting and
I sorta wanted to try it.

And, lo! I stumbled across it today, and shamefully concealed it at the bottom of my shopping[…]

So, we reach the top 4, an area, one would assume, of almost complete agreement between those voting but, for some reason, our fourth choice has elicited strong opinions, hence two different views. Let’s take this to the comments box!!![…]