J.L. Carr and Stocken Farm
I am a long time fan of the great English novelist J.L. Carr. The title of my novel ‘The Battle for Dole Acre’ is an homage to his ‘Battle of Pollock’s Crossing’, and I...
Category: Disestablishment
Why I’ve (re) joined the Greens.
UKIP are the face of exclusion. Because most people feel excluded from mainstream politics, fewer people participate in such limited democratic processes as remain. UKIP, appealing as they do to people who are frightened...
It’s only natural to feel awkward, Mr Farage.
For a few years now, I’ve been working away at a book about my friend Bob Rowberry, and how his life maps on to the history of the British counter-culture. For example, in...
Ras Tafari in Botolph St.Otto
Spume has just sent me this photo of His Imperial Majesty Haille Selassie visiting Botolph St Otto in 1939. Spume is on the far right, aged 16...
Why get your head together in the country?
My idea in renaming the blog bit of the website has root in my new (still in production) book, ‘A Hero For High Times’, and it is, at least in part, a reaction to...
How indeed…
This is a first pass in some haste to say hello to you, subscribers, regular visitors, victims of search engines (North/South divide? Tit-rub?) etc to the new look website. This is the fifth full...
Radio HSBC
We all popped into Hereford today, to buy some creosote to get over my clothes and into my eyes and also to some extent on our ricketty backyard fence. Also, I planned to visit...
Us (us us us us) and Them (them them them them)
It has been a very interesting experience making the programme for Radio Four about the North/South divide. As I followed the line across England on the map drawn up by Prof. Danny Dorling of...
HSBC and the virtue of profit.
I think this blog is going to be about economics. I’m not an economist. But since they seem to know bugger all anyway, I don’t see why any entirely unqualified bloke-in-the-pub shouldn’t chip in,...
Off with their heads…
I like a nice Royal wedding, me. To be honest, I quite like weddings per se. But I’m the father of daughters, and I think I’d worry a lot if one of my girls...
Anti-antidisestablishmentarianism
So, today it’s all been about constitutional and electoral reform. The New Party promise to deliver the things they promised to deliver 13 years ago with a majority of 160. The flagship idea is...
