I just had one of my tweets featured on The Guardian’s Life & Style page, offering my own modest contribution to the otherwise rather unassuming business of cooking baked beans. Let me just say, straight off the bat, I love baked beans and I’m not alone; around 2.3 million tins of those beauties are consumed…
Karma For a Lapsed Veggie
Here’s the story. For the last several months, I have been eating a vegetarian diet, due in part to ethical interests (as I have outlined before), but also because I was looking for a challenge. With the exception of needing a few food supplements to replace the loss of certain minerals in my day-to-day food…
Don’t Grow Up
For the past few weeks, the weather in London has been – what the Irish would describe as – “desperate.” Making my way to the work, a few soggy mornings ago, I caught glance of this shop front and despite the soaked and depressing concrete grays of the city at this time of year, it…
Harry Potter, Famous Dads and Stoke Newington
After two-and-just-under-a-quarter years, I have finally bid farewell to my pokey box room flat in Acton, West London, and moved into an altogether different pokey box room in the bohemian neighbourhood of Stoke Newington, North East London. The move coincides with my recent finishing of David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus Infinite Jest (a book that has single…
Why Even Bother
Without trying to come across as too pompous – yet doing just that – I would like to share a section from the introduction to a “Condensation of Animal Farm” published by World Digest in January 1946 and in reference to the writings of George Orwell. It goes a little like this: (Mr Orwell) does not hesitate to criticize…
The Best Book I Never Read
Killing time while waiting for a friend the other day, I saw this book on sale in a West London charity shop. Though on sale at a bargain £1, I didn’t pick it up. Something I may regret for years to come. I did, however, take a snap of the front cover because it is…
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…
Chupa Chups
I just found out that the logo for Chupa Chups lollies was designed by Salvador Dali. I’m not sure exactly what can be done with this information but I had to share it.
A stroll through London Bridge
The other day, I was due to view a new flat in Stoke Newington and had literally traveled across the city when I received an email from the advertiser informing me that the room had just been filled. Upset but never disheartened, I decided to make the best of the day and explore a part of…
A Billion in the Bank
Every day for the last year, I have bought the exact same £100,000-prize-scratch-card. With the exception of a few small wins (my largest was £10), as yet, I haven’t struck it rich. It is now getting to the point whereby I am no longer buying the tickets with the hope of winning the jackpot but…
Back in London
I returned to London after spending my Christmas in Bristol. Walking to Westminster Station, I took this quick picture of the Abbey with my phone. Such an incredible building. Follow my blog with Bloglovin
The Quick and the Pointless
It is a curious thing that you are now just as likely to find a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in a second-hand bookshop as you are to find a copy of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. It reminds me of the comedian Stewart Lee’s joke that, considering the current condition of the literary world, the…
Insert End of an Era Cliché Here
I was in White City earlier this week and took a stroll by the building previously known as BBC Television Centre. With the vacant office lights off and the complex’s main entrance barricaded shut, I was put in mind of the occasion I visited the disused ship manufacturing district in Belfast City (referred to by…
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…