Category Archives: Blather

This one is specially to make American readers feel better today — provided they are in the USA, that is: I was out walking today and noticed that the price of petrol has risen to £1.04 a litre, which is … Continue reading → Continue reading →

We were sitting around the kitchen table talking about the violently aborted holiday in France, and my mother said, reminiscently, that her mother hated the Irish; an odd sentiment seeing as how the whole of the rest of my family … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I should have been writing this in an agreeable hotel in Avignon. The room was booked, the first class tickets bought. We rose at five to catch the train to London. At the St Pancras retail destination (with attached railway … Continue reading → Continue reading →

A truly excellent foreign affairs blog by the FT columnist Gideon Rachman. Who could not love someone who writes This is vintage Steyn – jeering, complacent and utterly stupid. ? An elk has been rescued from a swimming pool after … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Should we treat stupidity like spam? I quite like the idea, especially as some people are working on a stupidfilter based on spam-fighting principles. With this in place, most comments on newspaper sites would just vanish. Also, if you poke … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Her show at the Junction last night was about the purest slab of punk/rock that I have ever experienced. It’s a small venue: there were maybe four or five hundred people there, all standing, and the sound was excellent. She … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Deborah Kerr is dead. The news doesn’t seem to have reached the wires yet; but my mother, to whose brother she was once married, just rang to tell me. She was a nice woman and a fine actress. Helmintholog: the … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I finally got the London Library’s electronic access to scholarly journals working. Still no JSTOR, but lots of goodies anyway, among them an article from the Journal of the American Academy of Religion arguing that the “Prosperity Gospel” movement, known … Continue reading → Continue reading →

This is an example — perhaps the platonically perfect example — of a joke which is either screamingly funny of wholly incomprehensible, with no region in between. It seems to me that if you understand it you are bound to … Continue reading → Continue reading →