It must be getting on for fifteen years ago that my good friend Daniel wrote “…on some days I listen to just one song, once”. That song was “Stumble” by Emily, still one of the greatest records I’ve ever heard. I&#[…]

Dual stories, historical hokum. I have a feeling that the literary establishment would not consider The Sacrifice Stone by Elizabeth Harris in the same sort of exulted breath as The Athenian Murders, but it plays the same kind of game. In story one w[…]

A relaunch for Stylus which should see it further shake off its (sometimes justified) rep as a kind of Pitchfork Junior. Under the scarily young and eager Todd Burns it’s always had a slightly broader focus than Pitchfork, paying a lot of atten[…]

When I think about going out to eat in the abstract, I have no trouble at all imagining myself to be the bold provocative food-pioneer who will eagerly try the most forbidding thing on the menu: viz the legendary “fish lips and duck webs”[…]

The lead character in Cypher is called Morgan Sullivan. So pleased was I with the Preston Sturges nod that I was more than willing to suspend my higher critical faculties as this film tiptoed around territories usually inhabited by films whose credi[…]

Ah, that’s what I like to see. A fellow publogger so entraptured by the venue that he still seems inebriated. Walthamstow Dog Track is the UK’s largest licenced establishment (strike one for those of you who thought it was Waxy O’Cu[…]

We’ve all gone to the dogs I’m not entirley sure this should be up here, but there’s something incredibly conducive about drinking at a dog track (in my case Walthamstow dogs). There’s the gambling (not entireley clever when[…]

When you think of computer games you think of action, violence, kinesis – or perhaps concentration and strategy, or competition and excitement, or accuracy and reward. The reason I enjoy football management games, I realised yesterday, is that […]

ITV1 is having a bit of a week for new series with fantastically awful names. Thursday night’s 9pm slot (RIP Bad Girls) will be filled by Sweet Medicine. This is a drama about a doctor called Nick Sweet. No really. Unfortunately I will be out o[…]

Be good to the pub and the pub will be good to you: on Friday we were drinking in the Enterprise up by Chalk Farm tube, a boozer I did not immediately take to, in fact it’s fair to say one I took agin. It’s a cousin of the Endurance on Be[…]