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 […]
Dissent’s volume knob
Back in antediluvian times (before the ‘social’ flood), small arguments and disputes felt different. It often started with ‘I’m not sure that’s a great idea’. The person had to feel fairly sure of him or […]
Against reading on holiday
Ideas, they say, weigh nothing. Their receptacles are another matter. According to my amateur polling, most of us return from holiday with two or three books that we didn’t read. My estimate is that the […]
Out of practice
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 […]