Baked Beans

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…

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…

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…

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…