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...
Category: Politics
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...
Ownership as trust
This is a policy idea; based on discussions with my friend and colleague at BCU, Gregory Leadbetter, who has done the heavy lifting. These days Greg is a fine poet and teacher of creative...
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...
A Walk to Bongville
I have been waiting to read Olivia Laing’s ‘To the River’ for a year; I couldn’t afford the hardback when I saw it in the summer in the Penrallt Gallery Bookshop in Machynlleth, but...
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,...
What it says on the card…
I like very much the idea that the Chinese are to be invited to put a few bob into Europe’s hat in order to solve the ‘Eurozone’ crisis, and have an image of what...
Greggs vs. Growth.
This is Sir Michael Darrington. If anybody knows anything about growth, it’s him, because for over 20 years he ran Greggs, to whose products I owe a great deal of my personal growth –...
Secret Garden Parties
Here’s a lovely photo of the author dressed very much en trende. The autumn is going to be all about knitwear, in my view. These woollen lederhosen, or wollenhosen as I guess we should...
This is the moment
For as long as anyone can remember, your educated liberal middle classes, of whom I guess I am a member, have despised the red tops (and the Mail and Express). They manipulate the news...
I’d love a bit of Green
I enjoyed watching these two six sided squares discussing the legalisation of drugs today. In principle I’m with Bob Ainsworth, as you might imagine. There are so many great reasons for legalisation, I hardly...
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...
