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Tattoos
I saw someone on the tube the other day with a penguin tattooed on her arm. It was quite well done, with shading and perspective. In fact, it could easily have been used as an illustration in a school textbook. Seeing her made me surprised all over again at how popular tattoos are. They’re basically […]
Read more...Quirky, absurd, whimsical
The Guardian review got me thinking about these words. In a way I’m surprised they exist, since there is very little in Britain that isn’t quirky, absurd or whimsical. I was in Derbyshire last weekend, where I visited Chatsworth House, the ancestral home of the dukes of Devonshire (the earls of Derby, of course, live […]
Read more...Low-key supernatural, part II
On Thursday evening I went to a pub called the Lamb, on Lamb’s Conduit Street. I was sitting in the low bit at the back, beside the door leading to the stairs (and thence to the lavatories and powder room). Kerry came back with our second drinks while I still had about an inch of […]
Read more...Today’s top search term
Of the searches that brought people to my website today, my favourite by far is “grow a beard like Nicholas II”. It’s great that someone out there wants to grow a beard like Tsar Nicholas II’s and is using the internet to find out how. It’s even better that Google thinks my site (this post) […]
Read more...It goes on
Today someone got to my site by googling “banana piano”. Welcome, weirdos all. There is a banana piano here.
Read more...Low-key supernatural
Last weekend I was at my friend Francesca’s house. There were four of us there, drinking wine, talking and listening to music on her boyfriend’s iPod, which was on top of the bookshelf. (Incidentally, Francesca is the only person I know who orders her books by colour.) We were sprawling around on the sofa or […]
Read more...Surrendering – Japanese vs Cubans
There’s a particularly unlikely true story on Giles Milton’s blog today about a former US gang member who repeatedly went out alone and talked huge numbers of Japanese soldiers into surrendering in World War II. Its theme of a lone man convincing vastly superior enemies to surrender reminded me of this Telegraph obituary of John […]
Read more...A late entry
Just when I thought people had stopped searching for “what looks like a bunch of bananas but isn’t”, it happened again. Will this phrase dog me for the rest of my life?
Read more...Good news and bad news
The good news is that the staff in Pret a Manger have finally learned to understand what I mean when I say ‘Bakewell’. They’ve been selling Bakewell tarts for over a year now, but – until today – whenever I asked for one the person serving me (in my Pret, they’re almost exclusively girls from South America) […]
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What looks like a bunch of bananas but isn’t?
Over the last few days there has been a mini-epidemic of people coming to this site because they Googled “What looks like a bunch of bananas but isn’t?” (WordPress tells me some of the search terms people use to come here – and they were all getting to a piece of flim-flam I wrote called […]
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