Small Beds and Large Bears

In the most recent LRB, Stephen Shapin reviews Michael Steinberger’s book about the fall of French cuisine. While Steinberger’s frankly bizarre neoliberal, uncontrollable-market afterwords can probably be discarded, the basic premise—that French cuisine is ossified and tedious—is one with which I can definitely concur.
I’ve suggested before that vegetarian food is a national cuisine’s “canary in [...]

I’ve mentioned before how much I love my yellow cycling jacket, but seasons change and eventually it becomes time to put away clothes better suited for the wet. The sun has started to show a more regular appearance, and I have a dowdier pacamac which I can stash in my panniers for the times when [...]

Teabags with tags are a pain in the arse. I mean, the idea seems sound—a heat-resistant paper handle to lift out a nearly boiling teabag—and probably did have a function before the invention of the spoon. These days, though, a tag is largely redundant unless you’re the sort of person who finds their experience of [...]

Hi,
Sorry I haven’t been in touch. Let’s recapitulate on events so far. My wife K. took out home-contents insurance with UIA Insurance a couple of years ago, in the names “K. —” and “J. —”. When it came to cancel the insurance, you refused to let my wife do so, saying there was a contract [...]

I admire skepticism. Being cool-headed about empirical situations helps you make informed conclusions, and hence decisions, even as you might labour under the pressure of those situations.
Science constitutes formalized skepticism: strictly so in its theoretical, dehumanized sense; more approximately so in the way that scientists as a whole practice their craft. But science’s skepticism is [...]

One of the tasks you have to attend to (desultorily) when you move house is changing one’s address with banks, utility companies and now the DVLA. Last night I had just finished addressing envelopes for both licence and car registration, when I heard on the radio that the postal workers’ strike would begin tomorrow viz [...]

The local branch of Sue Ryder is fed up of having post-carboot leavings dropped on its doorstep when it’s closed on a Sunday. Fair enough, I suppose: it turns out they can’t use the donations and have to pay a bit over a tenner to dispose of each bag.
In this age of PR and expert [...]

French cuisine is fucking awful, isn’t it? Not French food so much: I know people who’ve eaten some and enjoyed it. But cuisine, the artistry and craftsmanship of cooking, is pretty much dead in France. Ignorant, thick-headed, ritualistic, closed to new innovations, and just plain bad. Like Parisian architecture and the French language under the [...]

We’ve finally spent all of our wedding-gift Ikea vouchers, thank Christ. Not that we weren’t grateful for receiving them in the first place, of course: the final bill was reduced by an order of magnitude, which was a welcome surprise. And not that I don’t on one level like Ikea: the remarkably well laid-out showrooms [...]

Longstanding Bedswatchers will remember my brief assignation with recruiter Ron from Ashton Carthorse. I’ve not heard from Ron since then, and often I wonder what might have happened to him, whether his mother still has that sciatica, and if Barnesy the family pinscher is still tottering around in an incontinent manner. Would that we had [...]