There’s a nice piece by Zoe Williams in the Guardian today about the length of time it takes to accept new radio presenters (and overcome the hatred of the annoying trails they make). She makes the excellent point that most listeners have little awareness of stations other than the one they are loyal to. Jane [...]
Ever since we came back from Canada, I’ve had a craving for a good stack of American pancakes, eaten out, for breakfast one weekend morning. This simple craving turned into a bit of a quest when I realised it’s not so easy to get pancakes around here. I posted a question on the SE1 website [...]
I went to Google with the intention of looking for I forget what, starting my search with ‘ways to’. I got a bit freaked by Google’s suggestions: I am encouraged that “ways to say I love you” comes above “ways to kill yourself”. On the other hand, you’d sort of hope that people could work [...]
Martha Kearney is taking over as main presenter of the World at One – one of the BBC’s flagship news programmes. Ellen DeGeneres is presenting the Oscars.
My sister Octavia has been taking part in this year’s NaNoWriMo, the challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in a month, and she’s done it! She is a NaNoWriMo winner! Her novel came in at 50,250 words (but, for some reason the NaNoWriMo word count squeaked her in with a word count of 50,080), [...]
I was thinking today about the increase in the last few years of charity gifts at Christmas. You know the thing: a goat for a family in Ethiopia; a pile of bricks for a house somewhere else… You pay the charity and the recipient you know gets a card and a warm, fuzzy glow. I [...]
A quick heads up for a fantastic series of programmes running on Radio 4 at the moment, called Humphrys in Search of God. It’s a series of interviews with John Humphrys talking to a variety of religious leaders. The first one was with the Archbishop of Canterbury and was good, but not incredibly inspiring (probably [...]
There’s a piece on Crooked Timber about the Defense of Marriage Act in the USA. The key is: It denies benefits to legally recognized same-sex spouses of federal employees. What is amazing to me about this is that the Government is saying that states can do what they want, but bigotry will be alive and [...]
I’ve just been looking at Webcameron, the new website from the Conservative Party bringing lots of videos of David Cameron, leader of the Party, to an internet near you. I’d heard about it, of course, but hadn’t thought much of it until a Labour MP made a (really bad) spoof and put it on YouTube. [...]
At the risk of revisiting the horror that was my English A Level, I thought I’d write a few words about The Night Watch by Sarah Waters. I finished reading this a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve not got a new book on the go, so it’s been bouncing around my head a bit. [...]