A carpark in Croydon. Speaking to a male acquaintance with growing incredulity, a woman is relaying an urgent phone call that she recently took from a friend. “She said ‘I was repainting my flat, naked.’” The woman pauses, then poses the obvious rhetorical question. “Who paints naked?”. This seems a reasonable line of inquiry to […]
London Lucky Dip: painting naked and adopting house plants Read More »
The Parable of the Chinese Farmer has been on my mind recently. Though in my case the Parable of the Sleepless Writer would be more appropriate. A couple of years ago I bought an alarm clock. I wanted to sleep without my phone by my bedside, in an effort to reduce my screen time. My
The Good Decision / Bad Decision Alarm Clock Read More »
The moment I walk through the door, I can sense something is awry in the gents toilets. I know this thanks to years of hard-won experience. Every man of my generation was expected to learn the skill of navigating a pub toilet successfully. Perhaps the trend to gender nonconformity and unisex toilets will one day
Laundering pranks for Lads’ Night Theatre Read More »
Last year I started another strange collection. I began to look out for instances of what I thought of as ‘digital bathos’. That is: moments where a customer-facing digital display fails to have the desired effect, with mildly comic results. Misaligned and glitching messages on public transport always brought a weird satisfaction. Then I began
Digital Bathos: the petty joys of public glitches Read More »
In which I make a series of disturbing discoveries on the way to the shops, and witness a surreal, theatrical dispute on the streets of Wimbledon… The pavement is deserted and dark at 5pm, slick with rain, which is falling in a light haze. Below the curb, between two parked cars, I spot a large
London Lucky Dip: Gutter Baby and Discount Prospero Read More »
The 1968 debates between Gore Vidal and Willam F Buckley have already been litigated in print and documented on film. What can be learned from bringing Best of Enemies to the stage? It’s said that politics makes for strange bedfellows. Best of Enemies, currently showing at the Young Vic, proves that it can make for
‘Best of Enemies’ stages a Buckley-Vidal rematch Read More »
Selected scenes from the capital: A smoker’s modest proposal. A mobile art installation. Cheap thrills in the sweet shop. A steam train cameo… Two men are smoking outside a supermarket in Balham. A slightly shabby man approaches them. “Can I get one of those fags?” he asks. “Sorry,” says one of the smoking men. “These
London Lucky Dip: Snapshots from Autumn-Winter Read More »
I rarely sleep well, but some nights are more gruelling than others. This is a record of an especially restless night: messages from the frontier of sleeplessness… It’s like this some nights: the land of sleep is a nightclub with an implacable door policy. That’s one way I visualise my insomnia: I’m queuing alone outside
Insomnia Land: Eight Restless Dispatches from the Lonely Frontier Read More »
My garden had become an embarrassment. But nature still offered up a perfect summer moment, filling the sky with clouds of dancing seeds… It was a late July day and it was blissful, even for a shade-grown hayfever sufferer like me. Patches of mellow sunlight ebbed across our neglected garden in a lazy-river procession and
The Infinite Dandelion Probability Generator Read More »
My tinnitus was driving me crazy, so I headed to the beach. But instead of a paradise of white noise, I encountered a celestial silence that was deafening… I stood at the threshold of the divine and immediately wanted to go home. For most people, what I experienced would represent a moment of serenity, a
Slack water at the gates of heaven Read More »
