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 [...]

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, [...]

I very gladly took part in Record Store Day this year. Witney might not have much, but it does have one of the very few independent record shops in Oxfordshire, and a real gem at that: Rapture Entertainment. The previous time we lived out here I popped in almost every Saturday: it was a fantastic [...]

For those of you who haven’t bought it yet (and how could you not?) there’s a hidden track on the really quite remarkable—the only word for it—Christmas in the Heart by Bob Dylan. Here’s the lyrics to that track, Subterranean Homesick Blue Christmas, for your festive perusal. Merry Christmas, Mr Dylan!

Momus has discussed the late-70s/early-80s life and times of Alberto Camerini in a recent post. It was in the context of a recent BBC4 documentary Synth Britannia, and he helpfully links to the first ten minutes of the documentary for those of us who—sometimes to our pride, sometimes (like this one) to our shame—don’t have [...]

Most of the days at our parents’ Breton cottage ended up with a lot of red wine and some DVDs. Given that the restaurants that didn’t close were a car journey away and only served meat with meat, it was a good solution to the problem of everyone enjoying their evening.
This also meant K. and [...]

Forward! with the great people’s construction project! May great successes befall the imagining of your beneficient representation through the medium of collectively owned urban transport infrastructure! Celebrate the greatness of both our interpersonal bonds and the proletariat’s cultural simplicity, through enhanced technological efficiencies!
Along with being uploaded to YouTube, Inaugural Trams (featuring Franz Ferdinand’s Nick McCarthy [...]

Adam & Joe have gently pushed a boundary of the BBC’s idiosyncratic content delivery mechanisms. By which I mean they’re giving you free stuff.
In a recent blog post, Adam Buxton idly pointed visitors at files on a file-sharing site which join together to make their entire new year’s eve programme: jingles, music and all. [...]

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 [...]

While I spent Christmas at my in-laws, my—hatmandu’s—ancient purple iMac slept; so did my podcast subscriptions along with it. Given that there was already a lot of smashing programmes on Speechification that I was footshufflingly avoiding spending the time to listen to thoroughly, then my poor iTunes was full to bursting by the time I [...]