The London Book Swap Campaign
The London Book Swap campaign is an initiative with the aim of creating a London-wide…
Browsing: Musings
Malaysia Missive: Report II
We had a long weekend for Deepavali. We got a 50-minute flight to Kuala Terengganu where we stayed the night and got the 7.30am boat to Perhentian Basar, an amazing tropical island. There were monitor lizards up to three-feet long prowling around…
Malaysia Missive: Report I
“This trip has NOT gone to plan.” A well-meaning Eliot Ward writes home from distant Malaysia where, as a Cambridge science graduate, he was sent to teach…English.
Camden Lock
“I walked to Oxford Circus yesterday. Joined the canal at the bottom of Agar Grove. Reclaimed the city as only walking can. It is neither as big nor as scary as it appears.”
Day of the Jackass: Jonesy Meets Nick Clegg
“I could stab him with a cocktail stick! I’d go down in history as the man who attacked the Deputy Prime Minster with a buffet accessory.” Jonesy meets Nick Clegg in Whitehall. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear…
How to Date a Goddess
You have snagged yourself a Valentine’s date with a beautiful, mysterious, curvaceous bundle of trouble. What’s an intelligent, urbane man about town to do by way of preparation? A few words of advice from Lady Lavinia…
Nineteen and Fighting
Unless you are over 90 you will not have personal experience of fighting in a World War. To help us understand, Brain Hemingway shares extracts from the World War II diaries of his father Paddy, fighting in the RAF.
The Broken King
The sun periodically burned through the blanket of cloud so I chanced an outside table at one of the cafés on Swain’s Lane. I sat, looking enviously over at the well-heeled diners tucking into mountainous salads at Kalendar and Café Mozart.
Forty
I went to a 40th birthday party last Saturday. It was full of stupid, sleazy media types braying like donkeys, desperate to be liked, to be younger than they were, to be thought of as important, to be everything other than what they were.
Sex, Vogue & DC10
The sun sets in Ibiza at around 9.57pm, and as the moon comes up so do I, surrounded by a rush and heaving mass of vibrating bass, boom, boom, boom and in my head there, I go, you, me, I, he, all at once.
Haggis
As I passed below the mysterious Chanctonbury Ring, an Iron Age hill fort planted with a copse of beech trees bent north-east by the prevailing wind, I saw a figure stop at the gate I was approaching. He was waiting for me…
While You Were Asleep
Miss York is back with her sharpened pencil, musing late at night about words in our lexicon suffering the lash of society’s truculent tongue. To sleep, perchance to dream; ay, there’s the rub…