Small Beds and Large Bears

Whenever I want to write about Dan—apart from maybe the one obligatory and valedictory post—I worry that I’m leaving myself open to charges of solipsism, or at any rate a slight self-obsession and wallowing in it all. It’s all too easy to turn someone else’s minor misfortune into a story about yourself, but the problem [...]

The past four weeks we’ve been spending more time in—and I suppose on—the garden. Any proper gardener would be warning us to begin in earnest right now (and probably sucking in his teeth when he did so) but as we have no potting shed, and no desire to actually plant anything until we’ve worked out [...]

I’ve never thought of myself as the sort of internet junkie that can’t last more than an hour or so without tweeting, blogging or checking something online. I tend to be a briefly toe-dipping early adopter, then later on a resolute if unenthusiastic long-term user of new technologies. The idea is that this nets me [...]

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 [...]

There’s a set of animals which, on my journeys home, have a particular quality that I’d describe—if pushed—as eldritch. Horses, deer, barn owls. All of these animals stir some atavistic sense of wonder and fear inside me, and when they fleetingly flash past me I can see how my ancestors thought of them as ghosts, [...]

I’d seen the Age of Stupid before last night’s premiere, being involved very tangentially at one point. I remember when the lights went up at the end on that occasion, and many of the people in the audience—the majority of them not having seen the film before in its entirety—were choking back tears at the [...]

Speechification’s superb service to the nation has delivered The Human Button into my podcast tracking devicicule recently. It’s broadly speaking a nutritious slice of Reithian radio and very listenable, although just as establishment as milord would have loved to hear. The presenter Peter Hennessy is professor of contemporary British history at Queen Mary, University of [...]

The timing of this week’s ebbs and flows of work seemed almost destined to prevent me from mentioning the sad loss of John Martyn before burkesworks might comment on it. Only fair: he introduced me to Martyn, and is a far better authority on the subject.
burkesworks has friendslocked his post—with his typically wonky ‘worksy wont—but [...]

(Embargoed until our new letting contract went through.)
A few weeks ago, K. received a phone call from our very apologetic letting agents. Our regular contact had recently negotiated a good rent increase with the landlady, and had generally treated us really well over the last year: the main reason that we’d agreed to renew our [...]

Ponies are ace. Kate Beaton understands this:

On my route into work I pass two ponies in a field. They’re on the left-hand side of a right turn as I see them (vice versa in the dark on the way home). They wander around a triangle of land, chewing on things, occasionally huddling together [...]