Long time no talk

The last month was a particularly busy one and I haven’t had much of a moment to think of any kind of writing proper. We moved into our new home in West London and have all but gutted the place, taking a sledge hammer to the cheap IKEA furniture with which the previous tenants had…

A Rural Idyll in Steady Decline

The people of that plainly built farming town led simple lives and were proud of the hardship and forfeiture rural existence assumed of them. They knew their place in that world and – as is customary in such isolated surroundings – they conducted themselves with the same sheltered constancy as so many of their forebears had done for generations before.

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…

Giving life the runaround

Of all the tortures to which an otherwise sane person could willingly submit themselves, there are few activities I dread and despise more than jogging. Everything about this most sadistic of ventures fills me with equal measures of distain and revulsion. And yet, as soon as I arrive home from work, I waste no time in…