Wandering into HMV last night a short while before what would normally be closing time I was slightly bemused to find an unanticipated gaggle of 40 or so punters waiting for a Mark Owen promo appearance / live set. I was certainly amused, as I left, […]

As you can see from the website, Curtis and Grant are calling for an end to the genre that has made them rich and famous, as they release “the ULTIMATE romantic comedy”. If only it was…
(then again, it makes buying birthday/xmas pr[…]

Stuck on Scrabble! There’s nothing better than a complete and utter revelation within a sport. The moment where say, a football game goes from being a boring kick-about between a be-mulleted-giffer and scary German goalkeeper to an intricately […]

I don’t want my first coffee of the day GOOD, I want it STRONG!!
On days I have to go into work, no problem: the Pret at Angel makes coffee well (they don’t all but that one does). At home, I almost invariably have DOUWE EGBERTS, not cz […]

Red Wine VS White Wine: a recent ILE thread with a lot of poncing about different merlots and chardonnays and other such things which should stick to Footballer$ Wive$ but not a lot of help on my urgent and key white wine question: which is – h[…]

TIME COMMANDERS again, another the-past-is-a-v.-v.-foreign-country moment: Hittites vs Egyptians, the Battle of Qadesh. “This is before the Greek idea,” says my pal Aryk blithely, “of battles having a winner and a loser.” THOS[…]

Sunday mornings are a dry time for me televisually. The behemoth that is Hollyoaks has never suckered me in, and the other channels diet of Christian God bothering and non-specific deity bothering bothers me not. And running and hiding from Sunday Ho[…]

“Fox-elves cut off the people’s hair” – History of the Wei Dynasty, AD 477: The Fortean Times is 30 years old this month, and has a special commemorative supplement to celebrate. On the whole, they’re more likely to cove[…]

The photograph in Linda McCartney’s Home Cooking of ‘exciting non-meat products’ is frankly quite scary. The copyright of the books says 1987, but these products have a look that’s pure 70s. Vegetarian food packaging has imp[…]

I bought the Cutco Knives cookbook for the possibility of garish fifties food photos. After buying it, and actually reading the recipes, I realise, oh, it’s a MEAT cookbook, it won’t be overly useful as a cookbook to me. But oh, it’[…]