A few days ago, I dropped a newly-opened 500g tub of Flora margarine, and it landed, openside-down, on the kitchen floor. When I picked it up the entire polyunsaturated block decided that it quite liked it there, and came clean out of the tub. 1. I found that I was, in equal measure, irritated at […]

Borderline humorous froth

I’m getting to know the tree quite well now. Three* times running this week, on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, the train slowed, and finally stopped completely right alongside the tree. On one occasion for about ten minutes. I must have been sitting in the same place on the train, as each time I had the […]

The following essay was originally published in the increasingly aptly named All The Rage in November 2007. Read on, then pay them a visit. It is impossible for me to think of the Rubik’s Cube without a mental image of a schoolboy scuttling along a polished stone corridor with his hands in his blazer pockets: […]

Birds are abstract expressionists, but worms can only do self portaits.

So, yes, it’s autumn. According to this web page nothing happened in September, but that is wrong: a lot of things happened in September, it’s just that writing something for this web page wasn’t one of them. Because of, you might say, confusingly. Here though, now that it is autumn, is some information about things […]

What appealed to him about the Underground was the idea of descending into the earth in one part of the city and then shortly afterwards emerging up and out onto the street in a completely different place. This was teletransportation for the industrial age. But he subsequently realised that this was essentially a love of […]

If you want something to represent the stupidity and pointlessness of contemporary existence, then I suggest you look to the gunk that arrives day and night in my Thunderbird inbox. I was briefly cheered, however, when I noticed a message this morning. The header said it was from “Digby Faucett”, though the content of the […]

Subject: Re: Booker Prize special Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:37:45 +0100 (BST) From: [email protected] <[email protected]> To: Peter Fletcher [email] Dear Mr Fletcher, Thank you for your e-mail. I regret to inform you that this is a bet we will not be covering. If we can be of any further assistance, please contact us again […]

Large billboard posters around my city recently advertised a Lexus saloon with the following slogan: MOVES YOU In more ways than one. Can you see what they’ve done there? I was tempted to explain how the slogan worked, and why I thought it was a clever use of words, but then I realised that, like […]