monkey-wrenching the k-kapital machine:
obsessive US pol-wonks will know what this is abt viz the left blogosphere’s organised assault the last few days on the share price of a media corp called sinclair (which is planning to air an anti-kerry[…]

I had famous pork on Sunday. It came from Stinky Jim, you know, of Jimmy’s Farm fame. Jamie Oliver’s mate. That’s the one. Anyway, it had been brought from his piggery in Essex to Durham by my friend Pippa, who was there visiting he[…]

The aesthetics of hand-crafted CDRs — not that musicians actually sit around and carve in data on them, that would be a bit much. But increasingly my actual music purchases are steering away from ‘official’ CDs as such — perso[…]

Music as Wallpaper
I was watching Changing Rooms last night and heard ‘Winter Wooksie’ by Belle and Sebastian as background to Lawrence cutting out flowers. It felt right.
Given that this was coming to us from Chorleywood, Britain’s[…]

Alan Hollinghurst – The Line of Beauty
My local book group discussed this last month. I was the only one who enjoyed it. I felt I had to justify my position but found it difficult to explain why I liked it. It wasn’t nostalgia (the iconic[…]

WATCH WITH MOTHER : Heartbeat
mark s: heartbeat is just last of the summer wine except not funny – which means (tails off glumly) mum s: it’s not been any good since nick berry left *long pause, no canned laughter* mark s: do you always […]

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 […]