If you’ve ever listened to the song Running to Stand Still from U2’s Joshua Tree album you will have heard about the Dublin neighbourhood of Ballymun in the lyric, “I see seven towers but I only see one way out.” Located on the northern periphery of Dublin city, Ballymun was at one time Ireland’s largest and…
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I am an Emperor
Simon & Garfunkel sang in The Sound of Silence that “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.” I don’t know much about all that, but I happened upon this poem chalked onto the boarded up window of a condemned building on Camden High Street this afternoon. The grammar certainly leaves a…
A Bit of Political Rap
It’s no secret that I hold George Orwell’s writing in the highest of regard (this blog is named after a column that he wrote between 1943 and 1947 for the British left-wing newspaper Tribune). Over the last 2 years, I have read just about every word the man ever put to paper – as to be…
A Death in Morocco
Abraham’s son had drowned in a nearby river that morning. The boy, we would be later told, was 7 years old. The body washed to shore about a mile downstream from where he had been last seen playing with friends. A sharp undercurrent had caught him and he was unable to swim. None of the…
The Charming Irrelevance of Russell Brand
Last night, I watched uncomfortably as Russell Brand ranted at Jeremy Paxman on BBC’s Newsnight. Coming across more as a disaffected first-year-undergraduate-soc-and-pol-student than any sort of credible political commentator, Brand demonstrated not only an unsettling propensity towards demagoguery, but to be the most frustrating kind of citizen. That is, one that doesn’t vote. In fact,…
The Backlash Against Malcolm Gladwell
Earlier today, The Guardian’s website asked readers to submit questions which Stephen Fry would then relay to Malcolm Gladwell when the pair meet next week. Gladwell , you see, is currently publicizing his latest book, David and Goliath, on the topic of underdogs and overcoming adversity. Following a quick scroll through the page’s comments section, it…
The Religious Uses of Adobe Creative Suite
While I have absolutely no inclination to align myself with the ideologies of this particular Christian cult, I have to give them credit for some innovative graphic design skills. This ditty was handed to me while passing through Ealing Broadway Tube Station on my way home from work. Nice job Junction 316.
Siegfried Sassoon, Hopelessness and Iraq
Snooping around the charity shops of West London a week past, I spied a copy of Siegfried Sassoon’s fictionalized autobiography, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, on sale for £1. The discovery of such a volume came as a revelation as although I had been aware of and enjoyed Sassoon’s poetic work (along with Wilfred Owen)…
George and Syria
An exercise I’ve been recently conducting involves typing “what would George Orwell have to say about…” followed by any random topic into Google. People, it seems, cannot resist attributing opinions on topics such as the Iraq war, ipods, contact lenses and diet cola to a man who has been dead for well over sixty years….
A Distracting Ramble Through Nowhere in Particular
Much of what goes by the name of pleasure is simply an effort to destroy consciousness – George Orwell, 1946. I recently saw a youtube video of a 2003 interview with the late David Foster Wallace in which the writer expressed concern with what he regarded as a decline in the willingness of Americans to…
Christrionics
Finding my way through the begrimed passages that connect the ventricular routes of the London Tube service beneath Piccadilly Circus Station the other day, I happened upon a poster advertising an upcoming open-air reenactment of the trial, torture and death of Christianity’s top rockstar superhero, Jesus H. Christ. The Passion of Jesus, a modern imagining…
On Hemingway, Bulls, Fascists and Aliens
In an attempt to remedy the onset of misanthropy, I have recently been assisting with a West End theatrical reworking of Ernest Hemingway’s break through novel, The Sun Also Rises. Admittedly, my contribution to the production is – at best – very limited, consisting mostly of weekend stage hand dogsbodery. Nonetheless, the experience provides a…
Vege-might
Leopold Bloom may have eaten with relish the “inner organs of beasts and fowl” but I fear my own meat eating days could be swiftly drawing to an end. The decision to quit meat has been in the pipeline for several years. Whilst grudgingly employed as a chef, I maintained that the moment I was able…
Misprints, Miscommunications and Lies
In his highly entertaining inspection of the many uses and abuses of the English language, The King’s English, Kingsley Amis addresses the struggle between “illiteracies and barbarisms, and pedantries and genteelisms” [1] by identifying two distinct sorts of offender of whose linguistic habits one is impelled to “deplore if not abhor.” Amis classifies members of…