Longer ago than I want to admit knowing about Magazine had a song called Feed The Enemy. Yes you do know. Almost certainly, if you’re in any way seriously into music, otherwise you’re in the same camp as someone saying they don’t know anything about Mozart because he did his stuff before they were born. … Continue reading Reading with the enemy
It was sunny this morning. I’d almost got enough sleep. I put the new flashing pedals on my really nice bike, the ones I got on Ebay for £9 instead of the £35 they ought to cost, and rode it down to the paper-shop, four miles away through the empty lanes. Then up the back … Continue reading Small pleasures
I don’t know what the Liberal Party is about. I avoided running over Paddy Ashdown this week who seemed pleasantly surprised that a bicycle was stopping to let him cross on a crossing, and he seemed a straightforward-enough sort of person. Given the deranged style of riding of most cyclists I’ve encountered this week I’m … Continue reading The liberal consensus
The boxy big cars chased each other into the disused place. Something was burning in an oil drum. A man in a vest looked out of the window of a caravan as the bonnet of the Jag flew up and the back end of the Granada slid out sideways on the oily ground. Parts of … Continue reading It’s a wrap
I went down to the boat again today to make a start on the renovations. I’m also trying to take my mind off the small and potentially fatal issue of how I’m going to get the boat around to Aldeburgh Yacht Club, which doesn’t sound too threatening in and of itself, but it means going … Continue reading Bearing down
I didn’tused to like Christmas. Mostly because it was nothing like the Christmases I liked, to paraphrase the old song. It wasn’t just because Christmases were hardly ever white; where I grew up in Wiltshire they were mostly damp and muddy along with cold, a time of runny noses and sore nostrils in way that doesn’t … Continue reading So this is Christmas
The nurses are on strike today. In the usual way that people speak to very small children the government has told them they can have a 1% pay rise or something else but not both because Mummy and Daddy can’t afford it. So far as I’ve seen, nobody in government, the press or officially, the … Continue reading Trashing the NHS
Nothing you’re going to read here is new. No ground-shattering insights. No finally-revealed truths. I wish there were. There aren’t any. Almost everyone knows you shouldn’t go around killing other people and the people who don’t know that you can’t talk to anyway, because there isn’t any point. I’ve spent the morning trying to understand … Continue reading Trying to understand
After a long time scrabbling around to pay the bills I’ve finally found a paid job that will do that and quite a lot more, allowing me to continue to do the things I like doing. The things I seem to be able to do in a way that people seem to like, and things … Continue reading Start Monday
I was asked, out of the blue, to do some poetry for Mother’s Day, my first real grown-up paid-for gig. My relationship with my mother is distant, to say the least. There was a lot of confusion about my whole family while I was growing up, many myths and legends and deliberate obfuscation. So I … Continue reading An Eighty Percent Chance of Pain
