There are a lot of stupid things that supermarkets do to food that upset me. Wrapping cucumbers is of course everyone’s least favourite example of stupidity at work and washing potatoes counts as a close second. Washing carrots unnecessarily, s[…]

Here we are, at last.

Here we stand at the summit of Pop Football achievement, looking back at 63 matches: some wonderful, some perplexing, some illuminating, very few boring. We’ve heard so much pop, enjoyed so many marvellous moments, and […]

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,[…]

Roger Bozack returns from his mysterious illness and joins Peter Baran in the broadcast booth as the crucible of this Pop World Cup gets amplified to the breaking point – tossed on the horns of a swelling tide and cast into a literal pressure c[…]

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[…]

With just one round left to run, the Seventies continue to claw back some of their lost ground. Our leading decade took a knock in the Number Twos, as Johnny Logan notched up the lowest average score of any track to date – but with the voting f[…]

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[…]

After days of stasis, there’s change at last! A good result for Plan B in the last round has reversed the declining fortunes of the Teens, and the Seventies are finally off the bottom of the pile, where they have been languishing since Round Th[…]

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[…]