Small Beds and Large Bears

My parents spent a great deal of time on my junior orthodontics. Not money, though, thankfully: NHS dentistry was much easier to access in my youth (although read on for more news about that.) Still, the months I spent all braced up would, you’d expect, encourage me to look after my teeth into adulthood. Especially [...]

Continuing to live in Oxford and its shire, first as a graduate, then as a publishing junior, now as a senior geek, has meant that many of the Proustian experiences that might call forth some halcyon day or other have largely been diluted over time. Ten recollections often crowd around the single, sharp, painful one [...]

I’ve been trying with little success to buy a birthday card in Witney for my Granddad. The town has three card shops of note, not including gifty-wifty craft shops which sell cards with hand-affixed twine and sticks for the cost of a takeaway. You’d expect three shops to provide between them at least one card [...]

I was recently introduced to Charles Dickens by j4. Some twelve years ago I gave up on A Tale of Two Cities in disgust, finding it waffling and turgid; yet since the start of 2009 I’ve been engrossed in j4’s copy of Bleak House.
It was the perfect companion to my morning and evening two-bus [...]

Yesterday I was at Oxford’s One World Fair in the Town Hall. It was interesting enough. We saw a lot of very expensive carved wooden objets d’art and far more useful bric-à-brac. “Bric-à-brac,” pertaining as it does to products which are comparatively poorhouse, has long since lost any trace of italics, unless it’s being used [...]

Next Friday is my 31st, and there’ll be some sort of drinking happening in Oxford.
If you’d like to come then you’re almost certainly invited, unless you’d like to meet me and kill me. Feel free to leave a comment with a valid email address—or email me—and I’ll let any non-murderers know what’s going on.

One of the joys of being forgetful, or at any rate easily distracted, is that I frequently feel like I could really do with some tea, and look up to find I made myself some tea five minutes ago and started to work on something intensive. Whereas everyone knows you should go to work on [...]

Early autumn has a sadness sometimes, that late autumn does not. Like an ageing beauty clinging to its youth, summer is desperate not to release its grip. Summer activities are undertaken defiantly but desperately, until autumn and the prospect of winter ahead are embraced fully. We rail against carols in department stores, until we well [...]

I went to a gig at The Jericho (with optional Tavern) last night: one of the bands I’d seen before (and contains a friend and co-worker); one of them I missed as I had to catch my bus home; the other one was a sort of emo Subcircus. Now, I’m a fan of early Subcircus, [...]

This post consists of a request for information and an offer of transport, rather thinly dressed up as reflective autobiography.
For all my insisting that I’m vaguely obsessed with the indie/alternative, this year I will be attending my first Truck. I often look back at the late ’90s, when all that started and I was in [...]