Category Archives: Blather

Crossroads was the first music that I remember paralysing me with joy and the simultaneous knowledge that this joy was inextricably sad. Until then I had listened to music largely as a tribal thing. At my then school I was … Continue reading → Continue reading →

is Cthulhu’s own concept album: a lyric mashup of Tori Amos and Raymond Tallis. Every line in this horror has been printed. There are people paid to take every line seriously. There is also the FWB, who made this song. Continue reading →

When I lived in London, there were cassette stalls in the Portobello market which had bootlegs of all the interesting gigs in town. Where is the electronic equivalent for people who wanted to know what Cream sounded like last night? Continue reading →

Where in Europe would you want to live, if there were no oil and no Gulf Stream? Of the three really huge catastrophes impending in the next century, it seems improbable that we can avoid more than one or two. … Continue reading → Continue reading →

It’s chocolates all the way up, I tell you. Beyond the horizon there is nothing but chocolates, stacked out to infinity, and what we see is really the lid of the box. (A less compressed proof is here ) Continue reading →

What I love about photography is that it stops me looking at the world, and forces me to try to see it a little instead. When I am writing, thinking about writing, or even thinking of the usual nothing, I … Continue reading → Continue reading →

We had talked at a party at the Royal Society, and I liked him and was curious. So I went round for lunch at his house in Hampstead. One glorious anecdote emerged: in 1963 he was finishing his degree at … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I know this, because I have started sneezing at 5.30 every morning and the ladybirds are making shyly indecent suggestions to each other. Also because my walks by the river have shown the first rabbit, the first heron, innumerable wrens … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Apparently there are pubs near Leadburn, in Scotland, where you can buy Tandoori pickled eggs. George, who told me this story, says this is because Leadburn is surrounded by chicken farms, and after you’ve worked in one of those for … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Foreign readers may be puzzled by reports of a ‘blizzard‘ in the British press, often illustrated by pictures of cars on a road in snow so shallow that the edge of the pavement can clearly be seen. This morning, I … Continue reading → Continue reading →