Shooting Practice

Tired of taking terrible pictures, I bought a new camera a few weeks back and have been trying to improve my photography skills at every available opportunity since.  The woman and I found ourselves at a loose end this afternoon, so we packed my camera and a couple of sandwiches and took the train to…

This week in travel notices

Some regular visitors may recall that the workers at my local train station left a small conundrum on the travel notice board for commuters to try and solve last weekend. Unfortunately, they forgot to answer their own riddle and no solution was ever provided. However, after a small Google search I found that the answer…

A brief lesson in cool

Just once I’d like to enter a party like this: The clip is from the movie Cinderfella (1960) starring the incomparable Jerry Lewis. The story goes that this sequence was shot in a single take and at the end of the scene, when the Cinderfella character runs back up the staircase, Lewis actually suffered a…

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…

Literature, Icebergs and Movies

The members of the Pure Cinema Movement of the early 20th century understood  film and literature as two irreconcilably differing artistic forms. On the contrary,  I’ve always thought that beyond cosmetic details the two actually keep to very similar conventions. If you have ever attended a creative writing course then I’m sure that you’ll be familiar with the…