Posted in anniversaries, art, body, cars, children, commerce, cultural, cycles, denmark, design, development, diary, environment, establishment, experience, family, finland, food, language, location, media, nature, occupation, organisations, patriarchy, pedestrian, person, provision, public, sculpture, society, time, tourism, trains, transport on September 5th, 2010 No Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in art, cliques, death, diary, dreams, emotions, experience, family, friends, music, person, society on August 9th, 2010 No Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in belief, body, class_warfare, cliques, diary, election, enmity, entertainment, establishment, experience, fatigue, housing, lies, opinion, people, person, philosophy, politics, pragmatism, responsibility, society, understanding on May 10th, 2010 2 Comments »
The dust has yet to settle; yet any election blogpost is already out of date.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 [...]
Posted in age, diary, environment, experience, geography, location, mind, past, person, psychogeography, seasons, time, weather on March 11th, 2010 2 Comments »
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 [...]
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 [...]
Posted in diary, experience, past, time on January 4th, 2010 No Comments »
Looking back at 2009 in depth, I realise now that there was a lot more to it than I had first assumed. The middle half of the year was dominated by buying, and then decorating and moving into, a house: three months for the former, three for the latter. But I also wrote two chapters [...]
I want to make clear at the outset that I consider this season to be, if you like, a broad church. Plenty of religious and secular versions of a Long Night celebration coexist more or less grudgingly, with some occasionally complaining about their congregation being stolen by others: the predominant Christian festival; Hannukah; Yule; Thanksgiving; [...]
Posted in climate, consumption, crime, diary, environment, experience, far_away, future, location, opinion, people, politics, responsibility, society, time on December 6th, 2009 No Comments »
Yesterday K and I were at The Wave in London, the march against climate change. There’s a climate march in December every year, but this year put every other year’s to shame. The police initially said around 20,000 people (having been argued up from “five crusties and a dog on a string”), but apparently refused [...]
I was going to publish this article here, but he deserves more than mere pseudonymity. It should explain some of what I’ve been up to recently, anyway.
