INTRODUCTION: ABANDON OLD ROPE YE WHO ENTER HERE Hello. This guide features the contributions of several hundred journalists, writing or editing for national and regional papers and trade magazines or reporting for broadcasters. Periodically I […]
Why?
Years ago at a conference, I listened to a speaker talking about a marketing challenge faced by a power tool company. He described how the marketing team, struggling to maintain (let alone build) market share […]
To sleep, perchance to dream…
While on the subject of lists (see my previous blog post), here’s a whole selection of facts about sleep, gleaned from a variety of internet lists, supported by further digging. I can’t remember what this […]
Fake news: there’s (probably) a bylaw for that
While researching a potential story for a client, I found, scattered across the internet, a whole subgenre of lists of archaic bylaws that are still current. In typical internet fashion, many of the lists simply […]
Sketches of Little Britain
A few recent scribbles.
America
I’ve been a Paul Simon fan for more than 40 years. My parents owned Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. It was one of the I’d-inevitably-know-inside-out standards that my dad would play on the weekends, along with […]
I’ve found a buried chest
The term “cliffhanger” is considered to have originated with the serialised version of Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes, published serially in Tinsley’s Magazine in 1873. At the end of one instalment, Henry Knight, one of […]
Storytelling
Everything turns. I’ve spent too long lately staring at a blank sheet of paper. I was never a great student. I was, as one of my lecturers put it, “the type of scholar who, when entranced […]
Line by line
I’ve been teaching myself to draw. It’s a long time since I’ve picked up a pencil for any meaningful length of time and I’m loving it. The results are patchy, but there’s a great deal […]
RIP Clive James
I first read Clive James, in barren suburban Australia, pre-teen, early seventies, when my dad would bring home piles of old copies of The Observer from the office. He’d bring them home to evoke homesickness, but […]
“I, in my great and unmatched wisdom…”
Trump’s latest eternal quote, destined for thirty ‘how not to’ textbooks, and a brilliant Brian Bilston poem by lunchtime, lays bare his Achilles heel. Before the political dark ages, a pre-Christmas episode of Question Time […]
One share is enough
Compliance, adherence and acquiescence are beefy words often used in relation to rules. Built into each of those words is a sense of resistance and belligerence – as if those rules, ideally, should be more […]