I haven’t bought a newspaper for about five years. I read them online. On Sunday, however, I was at a friend’s house and, while the kettle was boiling and my friend was laying the cakes out, I flicked through the pile on the coffee table. Ah, Sunday Times Style, I thought, and had a look.… [Read more…]
May 7, 2010
The above statement may seem counterintuitive, even incorrect. Twitter sparkles with ideas, among all the links, gags, and TV commentary, and when people talk about politics, they talk of little else but change. So what the hell happened today? In my corner of Twitter, the pre-election talk was LibDems or bust. All sorts of people… [Read more…]
May 5, 2010
Two more days left until the election closes. Two more days of the thrilling yet sickening agony of not-knowing, knee deep in hashtags on Twitter. Or two more days to spend in Barking & Dagenham helping Hope Not Hate spread the word against the BNP, who are trying to take over the local council. I… [Read more…]
May 3, 2010
Change was long overdue, and here it is. There’ll be a proper relaunch of everything later on, but for now, please bear with me while I tweak any broken links and formatting glitches on this little upgrade. I’m keeping it simple for the moment and sticking with wordpress.com for now. Even so, there are 89… [Read more…]
May 1, 2010
I normally avoid current affairs blogging. There are so many experts, and ‘experts’, filling the air that I just can’t see how my opinion, scattered on the top with all the others like so many hundreds and thousands, is of any use to anyone. But I’m scared. It is childishly cynical to say ‘I don’t… [Read more…]
April 28, 2010
I hesitated about writing this post, because I will be sticking my toe out from under the liberal canopy, which always causes a chilly little wind to whip up from certain quarters. I am essentially a liberal. With some of my life experiences, it would be very weird and hypocritical if I wasn’t, but there… [Read more…]
April 25, 2010
I always feel a twinge of cynicism when I hear that someone is lecturing or writing about fame and celebrity. As a subject it is self referential to the point of dullness, despite the best efforts of the likes of Marina Hyde in the Guardian. There are only so many times you can hear about… [Read more…]
April 23, 2010
Anonymous hate mail had its moment in the spotlight this week, with this story: Historian’s wife and her poison pen expose dark side of literary criticism. Historian Orlando Figes, who teaches at Birkbeck, called in the lawyers when he was accused of penning nasty reviews of various colleagues’ work. How embarrassing, then, that the culprit… [Read more…]
February 15, 2010
I’ve had a run of know-it-alls recently. I’d love to say it was men as well, but the current selection of gargoyles is entirely female. There are some ladies out there who must have ditched Google long ago, unless they’re using webmail or something. Why on earth would they ever use Google? They know everything!… [Read more…]
January 28, 2010
The other day I had an interesting chat with Belinda Parmar, founder of Lady Geek, a new enterprise that ‘helps technology companies understand and sell to women.’ One of her current frustrations is the pinkification of technology, because the laydeez like everything pink, right? Our conversation sent me down memory lane to the 80s and… [Read more…]
May 11, 2010
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