Small Beds and Large Bears

It will come as no surprise to some to hear that I hurt my back again, first going to (niggling) and then returning from (alarming) Copenhagen. A combination of a week of stress over having to give a presentation, bookended by two attempts to lug cases up and down train station steps in four cities, [...]

We’ve both just returned from Copenhagen: a conference trip for me, a birthday holiday for K. Denmark is an oddity: much as Finland looks Scandinavian when you squint, Denmark looks a little Germanic when you don’t.
The capital city is wonderful in a lot of ways: it has London’s green lungs, and a brilliant public transport [...]

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 [...]

Anyone who has never had to have their ears syringed won’t know what a life-changing experience it is. I say this up front because otherwise such people won’t understand why I would write a blogpost about the experience, let alone such a laudatory one as this.
My ears had started to get blocked earlier this year, [...]

We’re back from what could now start being described as our “yearly vacation in Brittany,” seeing as we’ve done it two years in a row now. K’s parents own a one-time nightmare property which, in its fifteenth or so year of decorating and wrangling-with, has gradually been turned into an idyllic little retreat in the [...]

The dust has yet to settle; yet any election blogpost is already out of date. Other more savvy political commentators than me (and probably ones with more time on their hands) like Obsolete and Anton Vowl have already digested much of the results and have largely pre-empted much of the points I might make.
When I [...]

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 [...]

Over two years ago, I called out Dorset Cereals on their use of palm oil. Moving house and other nonsense intervened, and it was only recently I was able to start chasing them again. Their packaging still had palm oil listed among the ingredients, so in the aftermath of a Panorama programme about palm oil [...]

When we first moved from Oxford to Witney, some five years ago, we found the chattiness of neighbours almost stifling; having got used to that, we experienced it all over again when we moved to Eynsham village. It wasn’t that our neighbours weren’t lovely: but they were far more talkative than city dwellers, especially so [...]

Someone somewhere is clearly suggesting to commercial organizations, including but by no means limited to Waitrose, that what they need to boost sales is to advertise fake special offers. The idea is that you put an oversized price sticker on the price-label slot along the shelf, to suggest that the price of that particular item [...]