Londoners and other Londoners

It’s difficult to know what to say, write or think about the riots in London and city centres elsewhere in England. I live in the same borough as Tottenham, where it all started, and know people who were right in the epicentre of the trouble on Saturday night. I was planning to go shopping for

“A non-chain chain”

My latest fit of apoplectic rage has been gifted to me by the arrival of the bread shop Gail’s in Crouch End. The statement on their website is quite breathtakingly irritating: Like our bread, we handcraft each GAIL’s shop to be unique and have its own personality. GAIL’s fits into its local environment, adapting to

The End of Days

After a splendid Christmas, I am returning to the normal world in an even more apocalyptic frame of mind than usual. I am an unapologetic fan of Christmas in all its tinselly sparkly silly-games naffness. Those of a Scroogular bent, who mutter darkly about consumerism and outdated religious celebrations and so forth miss out on the

The controversial diagonal line

I went to the Van Doesburg exhibition at Tate Modern yesterday. I’ve yet to go to a press view at the Tate without being terribly late, howling across the wobbly bridge in the driving rain and bursting in ten minutes into the curator’s talk, in time to hear them say “…and that’s the most important

The cat’s clothes

I spent yesterday looking after a lovely little two and a half year old girl. I haven’t spent much time with her since she learned to speak, so it was nice to catch up. “Do you live at your house?” “Yes, I live in my house.” “Where your socks is?” (The dampness of my socks

Broken promise

I have something to confess: I announced that I was going to read new books by emerging authors but I’ve failed right out of the gate. I did dutifully check the London Review Bookshop site for inspiration, but I didn’t find anything that grabbed me so I ended up reading Philip Hensher’s ‘The Mulberry Empire’.

Isherwood and Berlin

I’ve received this email: There was a shoddy BBC4 documentary on this the other night, concentrating on the film of Cabaret. Isherwood like  the film, but pointed out that most of the cabarets in Weimar Berlin weren’t nearly so glamorous  and Broadway professional as the Bob Fosse musical.   The documentary made only a brief

The battle of the backlands

I have been woefully neglectful of this blog and of other aspects of life this week, having spent the majority of my time in an overheated council chamber in Wood Green, listening to a planning inquiry. This was a lot more interesting than I imagine it sounds – in fact it was great fun. For

Paris Peasant

I’ve been reading Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant in small doses for the last couple of days. I’ve delayed posting about it because I haven’t had anything to say yet – except for the obvious ‘it’s very odd’. Walter Benjamin describes having a dizzy sort of feeling when he read it, to which I can now

An unfortunate oversight

I realised a while after I posted on illustrated books that I forgot one rather obvious thing: graphic novels. Grown up comic books, in other words. I haven’t read many, so as yet I have rather ambivalent feelings. I like Robert Crumb and Joe Sacco and I really enjoyed the graphic novel version I have