More Than Mind Games

They showed the 1979 Election Night broadcast again on BBC Parliament yesterday. I watched it with four friends on Facebook and Twitter, myself here in Scotland, the others in Camden, Sussex and Oxford, comments chucking back and forth. I was trying to write at the same time, but little by little the programme dragged me…

It doesn’t matter where in the world it comes from now: the two things that gave radio commentary exoticism and atmosphere have gone. Never again will it sound as if it was being shouted down a bad telephone line (was it, in fact?) and never again will a celebratory roar overwhelm the microphone and render…

As I’m writing this, the news of Alan Shearer’s appointment to the Newcastle job is on every website bar Newcastle United’s own, so it might all still be an April Fool. And if so, a better one than the Graun’s depressingly poor Twitter put-on. When Keegan returned to Newcastle, I was one of the doomsayers,…

Late last year, the Accies’ ancient clubhouse came down. Part of the Raeburn Hotel went with it. It looks like this now : I’ll show you the rubble in a moment. There is, I discovered, a plan: the Hotel will be refurbished, and, behind it, a new state-of-the-art complex built that will carry the Accies…

I sat up all night when Columbia broke up, following the news via Samizdata’s Dale Amon. I’d seen the Challenger disaster live, too, but at the age of eighteen, which is different. Of course, NASA had carried forward an awful lot of ill fortune that really belonged to Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. But there’d been…

“Football and Television in Edinburgh” : I didn’t say “Scotland” as it might be different elsewhere. I was prompted to this by my struggles yesterday afternoon to watch ITV’s live coverage of the FA Cup Fourth Round tie between Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur, a suburban London side. Scottish ITV weren’t showing it. Anecdotally, I…

This is MTMG’s 600th post. I wanted to reflect for a moment on the privilege of living through a time in which, for the first time in history, there are things more exciting than war. International professional sport is the first: it’s better than politics, too, and these days Sky Sports News has become a…

Biased analyses of fMRI studies call into doubt some of the remarkably high correlations found between localised areas of brain activity and specific psychological measures.  In other words, researchers have been seeing what they wanted and expected to see, and they’ve been unconsciously creating the experimentational circumstances in which their hunches are confirmed. I’d long…

(What follows derives from research for a fiction project) By 1979, English football was clapped out. Decaying stadia, violent fans, and the fading away of the post-War talent boom left most lovers of sport with little to cheer. There had been eighty years of the Football League. For most of that time, the League had…

Haruki Murakami, interviewed by the Paris Review, passes on some trade secrets: When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to…