Book ’em
Scrapbooking is the purview of sad old ladies with too much time on their hand. Its too cute, too chaotic, too colourful. The fonts are all wrong. They try to hard. There are too many accessories. They try to do things like make pompon[…]

Rediscovered thanks to Jess’s article which pointed me at web.archive.org. My old website from the 90s had a lot of crap on it, and it is embarassing to discover it still out there in the internet, when i thought it had all been lost in my move[…]

ANTARCTICA AND THE ARCTIC: THE COMPLETE ENCYCLOPEDIA
by David McGonigal and Lynn Woodworth
Sometimes all you need is a good coffee-table picture book — and this one is GREAT. Published just the other year, it might well be the hands-down slamb[…]

Rereading children’s books as an adult – those you haven’t looked at once since childhood – you sometimes slam into a particular contraction of response: a sort of ultra-localised Tom’s Midnight Garden Effect (TMGE), in […]

Finch
The problem with making words like boring, banal, decorative and pretty compliments, is that there is nothing left when a critic encounters awful spectacles like this: http://www.spencerfinch.com/[…]

(So Much For My)Happy Ending Watch:
It seems to be a current obsession of mine that more books, films and whatnot seem to have incongruous happy endings. And I don’t just mean rom-coms. Books which are explicitly structured as tragic narratives[…]

Serendipity in the West Midlands
The discovery of art in the provinces is my 2005 ambition. Fuelled by finding a gallery devoted to GF Watts in a small Surrey village, I’ve started looking elsewhere for small-town galleries. So I went to Walsal[…]

Credit where credits due.
Apparently I was quoted in The Times on Saturday (a dull tedious work thing). But they spelt my name wrong. Of course this is a nice way of discrediting the august paper of record for not fact checking (and I did spell my na[…]

Slaine The King
Music Zone (there’s one on Oxford Street) is having a sale, and I picked up this nice hardback comic album for under a fiver (they also have the complete Halo Jones at the same price, among many other things, lots of Judge Dredd[…]

Homeless.
Diaspora, Refugee, Homeless–the ideas are abstractions, even the concept of palestine is an abstraction–so that to talk about them, it becomes a dystopian non oz. Reading it, one forgets the ironies, the complexities, and the ve[…]