Just recently, I’ve got heavily into traditional music – specifically, traditional English, Scottish and Irish music. One of the effects has been to make me feel a bit ambivalent about the local folk club – which is ironic, as it’s going to the folk club that exposed me to traditional music in the first place.
I [...]
WorldbyStorm:
Once Blair et al dreamed of a hegemonic project that would dominate the centre left for decades. At this rate they’ll be lucky to salvage anything from the wreckage.
Which reminded me of something I wrote for Casablanca (anyone else remember Casablanca?) in October 1994. To set the scene, John Major’s Conservative government had been re-elected [...]
A bit more oneirography (I don’t intend to make a habit of it). I had a dream last night which reminded me oddly of a dream I made up some years ago. (I wrote it for a short story (unpublished); the story was vaguely, partially autobiographical, but the dream was completely made up.) See if [...]
Or: my life as a biographer.
Rob asked about my reference to writing a biography of Debord. It goes back to the old bastard’s death in 1994. I marked his passing by sending postcards to several people with his dates and the words “Bernard, Bernard, this bloom of youth will not last forever”. More practically, I [...]
15 February 2008 – 4:46 pm
Jamie picks up on a handy new proposal for making use of all those ex-servicemen the Iraq war is eventually going to leave us with:
Ex-servicemen and women should be retrained as teachers to bring military style discipline to tough inner city schools, a think tank has said. The Centre for Policy Studies says ex-soldiers could [...]
6 January 2008 – 10:53 pm
A post-Christmas meme from Rob.
1. Wrapping paper or gift bags?
Wrapping paper. Bags are for bottles of wine.
2. Real tree or artificial?
We switched to real trees a few years ago. This year was our first dead tree stuck in a bit of wood; it dried out quite a lot over the twelve days, and [...]
4 September 2007 – 3:15 pm
I turned 47 recently. Yes, that is quite old. Lines from Krapp’s Last Tape come to mind, as they do from time to time.
I’ve never linked to the Metro before, and never expected to. But this made me laugh out loud:
At this weekend’s Bestival, a three-day music event on the Isle of Wight, the Government [...]
I’ve been away for a week & come back to a letter from my MP, Tony Lloyd. Who writes:
Whilst I do not think there should be a blanket policy for all Iraqis working for the UK Government, we need to give proper consideration to the many Iraqis whose lives are at risk. It is important [...]
13 August 2007 – 11:29 pm
If not his epitaph – that would be a bit harsh – it was his epithet; the film posters only spelt it out. Ian Curtis: genius. Shaun Ryder: poet. Tony Wilson: twat.
The Evening News recalled this at the front of their tribute, but missed the catch by printing the ‘polite version’: Wilson was nobody’s prat. [...]
11 August 2007 – 12:18 pm
I heard the news about 8.30 last night; my wife saw it on the BBC Web site. I spent some time looking for hastily-assembled tribute programmes in the schedules – you’d think Granada would have something at least – but nothing. There was a discussion on Newsnight between Stephen Morris, Paul Morley, Peter Saville and [...]
Andy:
It is inevitable that there will be a debate about our English identity, and the values that we wish to embrace in our culture. The left needs to participate in that debate, and fight against the Little Englanders. However, we will be greatly aided in this if we recognise that the British state, and the [...]
More from the last century. This one had a wider audience than many of my columns, as it appeared in Computing. I wrote five of these columns for the paper in the first half of 1999, working on a rota with four or five other writers, after which they had a big reorganisation and dropped [...]
A while ago Rob passed me the meme stick with a couple of questions deriving from Big Brother:
Tell your readers three things about you that would make you the Ideal Housemate if you were imprisoned in a house with ten random strangers for weeks on end. Then three things that’d make you the Housemate From [...]
21 September 2006 – 9:53 pm
The British land speed record currently stands at 300.3 mph. It doesn’t look as if Richard Hammond will be the driver to break it.
If ‘driver’ is the word. News coverage of the Hammond story has stressed how unlike a car, in any familiar sense of the word, was the thing that Hammond tried and failed [...]
6 September 2006 – 10:30 pm
Here are some of the things that happened when I was nine (give or take a couple of months either way), and which I remember. (I’m using the BBC site rather than Wikipedia, which doesn’t seem to have much British news from that far back.)
Apollo 11 (I remember watching the landing)
The introduction of the 50p [...]
When my son was born the midwife commented on his oily skin – “he’ll be a spotty teenager”. My own skin is noted for its sebaceous quality, so my reaction wasn’t surprise so much as anticipatory fellow-feeling – tempered by the utter inability to imagine this eight-pound armful as a teenager, spotty or otherwise.
He’s nearly [...]
Some time in the mid- to late 1970s I saw a fairly right-on play, set in Hulme in a dystopian near-future. (I had never been to Manchester and thought I was hugely enlightened for already knowing not only that there was such a place as Hulme but how to pronounce it – the L was [...]
I interviewed Mark Thomas once – you can probably find the interview on the Red Pepper Web site if you look hard enough. Originally it was in three or four sections, each one prefaced with a quote from “White man in Hammersmith Palais”; a bit of a pretentious device, which unsurprisingly got lost in subbing. [...]
This is the country where I grew up:
The half-sheet of neatly typed paper is still where it has been for the last 40 years, tucked under the perspex cover of a map table in an underground operations room beneath a nondescript suburb of York.”Thirty minutes after the above occurrence the DC is to check Display [...]
The word on the streets:
“Even the most loyal Labour voters look embarrassed and look away. Others just laugh. Now, I’ve never had that before,” says one leading MP.
Loyalty to the Labour Party runs deep. You don’t just vote Labour or support Labour, you are Labour. “We’re Lib Dems” is a statement of principled, idealistic affiliation; [...]
