Rhyme and reason
‘It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds…
Defund the police
Forces have become too politicised to function
Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways
Grade: A ‘Rough’ in terms of the mostly spoken vocals, but only ‘rowdy’ if you’re approaching your 80th birthday, which…
Flipping, flopping and failing
I don’t know what’s happened to our football hooligans. The modern malaise, I suppose. A gradual descent into ineffectuality. Back…
A rabbi stabbed, but no hate crime?
A mystery has occurred. In The Affluent People’s Republic of North London, a rabbi was stabbed on the street multiple…
Free speech matters
The Eastern Orthodox Church has decided that yoga is incompatible with Christianity. This is an enormous problem for me, as…
The 1975: Notes on a Conditional Form
Grade: B+ Just what you wanted. An opening track that matches banal piano noodling to an address by Greta Thunberg.…
The great Newsnight delusion
The Twitter feed of BBC Newsnight editor Esme Wren (remember, I read this stuff so you don’t have to) is…
We can’t see the wood for the trees
I was relieved to discover, earlier this week, that the Prime Minister’s special adviser, Dominic Cummings, was a symbol of…
Why schools should stay shut
Has the stock of any politician fallen more sharply, these past three or four years, than that of Shami Chakrabarti?…
In defence of the lockdown
I realised things were getting back to normal when I threw away a third of a tin of chopped tomatoes…
The politics of bookshelves
I pulled a Canadian girl in a nightclub, back when I was in my very early twenties. She seemed very…
Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters
Grade: C+ Where did they all come from, the quirky yet meaningful rock chicks who don’t have a decent song…
This crisis will be decided by politics, not science
One of the strangest developments to have occurred during this very strange time is that the Prime Minister’s special adviser,…
Our impatience will end the lockdown
At the farm shop this morning there was a chap panic-buying a large metal and plaster flamingo. It was the…
Would Churchill have worn a face mask?
The problem with face masks is cutting an opening of the right size to accommodate a cigarette, without the hole…
There’s nothing equal about this virus
Filthy germ-laden townsfolk were out and about on the footpaths near my home on Easter Sunday, dragging with them their…
Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus: Songs of Yearning
Grade: A It has taken 33 years — during which time this decidedly strange Liverpool collective have put out only…
Leave my cigarettes out of this
The owners of my local grocery shop, a mile or so from my house, very kindly sell me cigarettes in…
Lockdown’s a treat for curtain-twitchers
Welcome, then, to a country in which the police send drones to humiliate people taking a walk and dried pasta…
I’ve been self-isolating for 20 years
Hulking fat chavs pushing shopping trolleys full of lavatory paper back to their Nissan Micras. I can’t think of a…
Britain has its first punk-rock government
The most surprising thing about the letter from Guardian and Observer journalists moaning about Suzanne Moore’s supposed ‘transphobia’ is that…
I’m getting my coronavirus bunker ready
We have now got past the absurd stage of glaring in a reproachful manner at Chinese people on the tube.…
Green Day: Father of All…
Grade: B+ It is an eternal mystery to me why Britain has never had much time for power pop, seeing…
The war the government must win
We will rue the day we all decided bullying was a bad thing. The consequence is that the inept, the…
