I’m back to work on Monday after three weeks off, visiting Krakow, Budapest, Timisoara, Bucharest, Istanbul and Sofia. They’re all places I haven’t visited, all with their abundant share of relatively recent social tectonics. A […]
Boundaries
I pass these two businesses on the way to the station. They’re quite a long way from any other shops. A Laundrette and Barber shop. The Laundrette sort of makes sense. There are lots of […]
Stale
When I was a kid, the internet came in 26 volumes. It was called the World Book Encycopaedia or Encyclopaedia Britannica. My dad, futurologist that he was, was sceptical about the value of ownership […]
Ant Man
Spoiler alert. There’s a scene in Avengers End Game in which Ant Man, Paul Rudd in an impressive suit, flips in a millisecond from being tiny to being massive, then quickly taking out the bad […]
Happily ever after
The point of this well-worn line is to satisfy a reader at the end of a story. We’ve got to know the characters and we want to know what becomes of them. Google ‘happily ever […]
Honeysuckle Creek
It’s the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing this year. I might be the Walter Mitty of spacemen these days, occasionally commuting to the office in my replica Apollo 11 suit, but I did […]
RIP ‘on message’
I remember going to a marketing conference in the 1990s. For his warm-up, one of the speakers asked the audience to name people who they thought retail brands would be if they became sentient. The […]
Style crimes
I found some old knitting patterns in a junk shop on the weekend. Not only were the designs pretty awful, the images looked like scenes from old crime movies. Here they are:
The Farage Balloon
It’s 22 years this month since Michael Howard was put on the spot in a famous encounter over his treatment of the Director of Prisons by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight. What a different time that […]
