Monthly Archives: August 2015

Never begin a sentence ‘When I was young…’ and never continue with; ‘we made our own amusement.’ However, when I was young we made our own amusement, from which something fell out of the Jamboree Bag of my mind; giveaways in British comics, one of which was a piece of cardboard folded from corner to […]

I’m not a huge believer in How To Write guides. I’ve tried to read several books on writing novels, but the only one I enjoyed was Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’, because it’s more of a pulpy, bouncy memoir about being a popular writer than a proscriptive list of dry rules for story structure academics. In […]

Ah, the steep hills and winding gardens, the trolley-buses, the great spanning bridge, the earthquake. I must be in Lisbon. I could have added ‘the Fado’ and given the game away – that mellifluous, doom-laden guitar is never far from any street corner. But the first thing you notice is how Lisbon glitters. Its streets […]

How many ways can you perform it? And why does it periodically take such a grip on Britain? The furore over Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet grew to fever pitch this summer, ‘To Be Or Not To Be’ shunted to the front of the play, then back, and tickets changing hands for absurd amounts. ‘Cumberbitches’, for God’s […]

While I was staying in a very English cottage Kent last weekend, I noticed that the guest book pointed out other former residents, including Mr Pastry. This one is as peculiar as it gets, so stay with me. Britain was once awash in novelty acts, from the man who sang ‘Mule Train’ while bashing himself […]

Get ready to say goodbye to parts of Denmark Street, London’s Tin Pan Alley, where everyone from the Rolling Stones to the Sex Pistols tried out their guitars in the shops and studios. The demolition squads are heading for the street and its alleyways, including Denmark Place, a row of battered terraced houses off Charing […]

To anyone stumbling across this site the selection of subjects must seem random in the extreme. Actually it’s quite deliberately planned. I don’t carry advertising, and I don’t write much about politics or religion because I’m a confused liberal atheist who has watched the arrival and departure of a thousand political candidates with bemusement ever […]

Just when it seems that London’s bling-property economy may be faltering (as reported in the press this week), the ‘developers’ of the new FutureSlums (sorry, ‘Luxury Loft Lifestyle’ Apartment Buildings) at South London’s Nine Elms are planning to bring to our fair city, or at least 1% of 1% of London, this hilarious Six Senses-style […]

While we’re talking about quirky soundtracks (oh, sorry, weren’t we?) the late sixties produced a lot of soundtracks with sung title themes, many of them extremely memorable and catchy earworms. First, here’s an audio Q&A of a song featuring Peter Sellars and The Hollies (does anyone remember them?) from the comedy caper ‘After The Fox’, […]

So there’s going to be a spiffy new 900-seat theatre beside Tower Bridge from Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr, who oversaw 12 years of artistic and commercial success at  the National, running the show. It’ll be the flagship home for the London Theatre Company and will operate entirely on a commercial basis with no subsidies or […]