Monthly Archives: February 2009

London Fashion Week finished with a day of menswear. Yes, the current London style of wearing a skin-tight grey cardigan over a check shirt is over. You no longer have to look like an emaciated version of your grand-dad. Instead, choose one of these outfits and be the talk of certain parts of the town […]

When I was a kid, one of the first films I ever saw was ‘tom thumb’, which always played on the lower half of a double bill with ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, and I much preferred it to the main feature. For years, I was haunted by the creepy, charming Yawning Man. The film seems […]

Richard Williamson is the Bishop whose excommunication was lifted by the Pope in spite of him being a Holocaust denier. The ultraconservative Man Of God (or ‘nutcase’) is coming to Britain to stay with an anti-Semite former beauty queen and socialite (or ”Dimwit’).

Joseph Grimaldi was the greatest British clown. Every year on the first Sunday in February, clowns from across the country meet in Dalston, East London, for the church service in his memory. This has been an annual tradition since 1946. In 1967 permission was given for clowns to attend in costume. Joey was born in […]

I’m researching tales of the tube at the moment, and have long heard stories about pigeons riding the tube to come in from city’s outskirts for the junk-food-horror that is Leicester Square. It seems a highly risible idea, but I’ve spoken to a few tube guards who swear this is true, and one of them […]

Martin Sorensen from Kepler’s Books in the US sends me a great story about New York subway trains ‘singing’ the opening of the song ‘Somewhere’ from West Side Story. It’s to do with alternating current, and how this ended up sounding like a Sondheim song is explained here

…The Monument reopened. Wren’s commemorative 202 ft Doric column to the Great Fire of London had been planned and built very soon after the event, and has now been restored to its former glory. Its height is the distance to the fire’s starting point. A rather smart 3-D poster for jeans in the style of […]

The wonderful Douglas Adams started a trend for finding new words to suit previously unvoiced concepts. My favourite was a word for ‘the behaviour of sellotape when you’re tired’. He used the names of defunct railway stations. How about creating appropriate words for the following states? There needs to be a word for the feeling […]

I’ve been searching London’s upper storeys for years – ever since my novel ‘Roofworld’, in fact. But this is the only example I can recall of the Beatles’ influence in London. This shop is in Hanway Street, off Tottenham Court Road, and has a definite touch of Yellow Submarines about it.

…Oliver, that is. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the stage musical hadn’t been around for over 40 years, or the book for 171 years, given all the attention it’s been getting in the last few months. The book’s famous illustrations showing views of London have never been bettered, so I was surprised to come […]