Every Tuesday at 8.45pm, I stand in the silent lane alone and bang my Le Creusets in support of a group of brave people who must never be forgotten; unsung martyrs who, through no fault of their own, have found themselves working at the very heart of a terrible unfolding disaster of an unprecedented scale…
During my mandated morning meanderings my mind returns to one of my favourite books, Arthur Machen’s 1924 non-novel, The London Adventure. Alternatively titled The Art of Wandering, the absurd work is 96 years old but has never felt more contemporary. The haughty writer-narrator, newly bound by the responsibility of fatherhood, must now write for money…
Here inside, I am losing it. I watched Carry on Screaming and enjoyed it unreservedly. My right arm seems to have stopped working, making it difficult to do Nazi salutes at the television whenever a government minister comes on. And I found myself asking a pigeon, sitting on the fence outside the kitchen window, how…
To combat corona, the government are reassembling the Isaac Levido-led team that won the election. The virus is sure to be defeated by cynically re-edited footage of Keir Starmer appearing confused or by faking Facebook posts and temporarily renaming the Conservative party website coronavirusgohome.com. You cannot beat Covid-19 with lies. That plague ship has sailed.…
“Am I right in remembering you cultivate a colony of head lice in your cellar, Lee?” Nicola Bridgens, former artist in residence at London Zoo, for whom I once provided the voice of a depressed black widow in an insect house installation, called me, coveting my Pediculi humanus capitis. Ten years ago, my little boy…
“When the government closed the pubs, I said – I didn’t mince my words, I said to them myself, HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.” MS Toilets, The Wetherspoonland, 1922 A public health official friend tells me her colleagues now call the Covid-19 virus “Wetherspoon’s Mumps”, a darkly comic response to Wetherspoon boss Tim Wetherspoon’s initial…