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This is a short video I made about three years ago, and some of you will remember having seen it already.  Apologies for the slurred-soppy-stern voiceover: at the time, I was pretty poor at intonation and pacing myself, and it’s hard to make out the sense of what I’m saying some of the time. Still,…

Whatever else might be said about “Will Rubbish” remember this: he created a superb group blog that had Terry Glavin and George Szirtes on board, real luminaries of whom you have heard, to say nothing of a substantial chunk of the real left-wing blogging talent. Peter, Shuggy, Eric, Hak, Spirit, Bagrec.. If things went downhill…

In comments yesterday, George Szirtes enquired rhetorically about why Bobby Robson was so loved, and he answers his own question magnificently here. “The right sort of sportsman”, in other words. Most of the great football clubs of England were founded by firms or by churches to provide godly uplifting activity and entertainment to men in what…

If the medical goes through. And, it should be taken as no insult to Stoke or Hull that the news comes as something of a relief. (More beneath the cut)

606 was group therapy last night. Chelsea fan after Chelsea fan heard their own voices slurring under an unsuspected weight that, the future gone from them, they could suddenly feel.  There was a lot of anger spoken of unfelt. Tiredness and resignation masqueraded as rage. Lovejoy called for vengeance, but his “I want United to…

Iain Dale commented not long ago that British political blogging hadn’t “yet” made the inroads achieved by its counterparts in the United States. That left some of us muttering to ourselves about how that was because British political blogging wasn’t actually terribly good, and that the bloggers who did show any talent were already writers…

There are so many bad decisions in the first two minutes of this clip that I really don’t know where to begin: [youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=4xH2ueGntDM] I’d started school the previous January. My grandmother and her sisters had attended Clapham Road Lower School too, seventy years before. It had been brand new then; by the time I was…

Aged five, I’d be there on the brick floor of my gran’s scullery taking apart an old clock with a screwdriver. There were quite a few to choose from as one by one my mother’s half of the family died away and their priceless knick-knacks found their way to our terrace. I still own one…

My wife turns 40 today. I’d like to have bought her a horse. But this one belongs to Westons, the cider people. And our flat’s on the first floor.  Next year.

(Click to enlarge) Andrew Pitcairn-Knowles (1871-1956) was one of that lost British type, the cheery, never-take-no-for-an-answer, not-quite-eccentric-thankyou pioneer. Photographs of him show an open, confident man, whose face says “buy me a beer,” or would do had he not been a pioneer of health farms as well as photo-journalism. The raging beauty in the front…