Man, am I ever hungover. I sit in a hotel room in Birmingham feeling like I got into an ill-advised scrap with a giant. It is, of course, entirely my fault; I was seduced by that great Tory conference temptation, free champagne. And there is a whole day and a half of conference still left […]
Archives for September 2014
Will the Tories split into two parties?
Birmingham and Tory conference just go together in my mind somehow. I feel like it should be here every year. It’s not the south and it’s not the north, greatly advantageous. The ICC is business like, efficient, reflecting the party itself. Or at least the Conservative Party as some within see it. Increasingly, the party […]
The Reckless defection: what next?
I’m on my way to Birmingham for Conservative Party conference at present. Looking forward to finding out what the mood is when I get there, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not a million miles away from what I found in Manchester last week: slight feeling of doom, that things haven’t panned out as […]
The state of porn in Fargo, North Dakota
I had a fair few journeys on a Greyhound when I was in my youth, across the great expanse that is the United States of America. Taking a Greyhound coach is far and away the cheapest way of getting around America, so cheap that when I look back on it I don’t really understand how the […]
The war against ISIL cannot be won in Iraq alone
As someone who is a member of a small pot of people arguing for military intervention in Syria, pretty much since the civil war there kicked off in2011, hearing this week that the UK government is finally getting serious about trying to tackle a problem that has spun so wildly out of hand, i.e. ISIL, is […]
The greatest album in the universe
I guess talking about “albums” is pretty old school. What do the kids call collections of songs by leading artists nowadays? I guess they probably don’t. Anyhow, back when albums were a thing, a great yet now mostly forgotten one was released in 1991. It features the vocals of one John S Hall, who was […]
Communique from the front lines: Labour conference, Manchester
I used to live in Manchester, a very long time ago. It was a very different city then, in the late 90’s, post-IRA bombing, pre-Commonwealth Games/EU funding makeover. Piccadilly Rail Station used to be possibly the worst place in all of Britain; now, you’d happily spend an hour there waiting for your train while munching […]
X Factor round-up: Raign v Cheryl Cole, Simon Cowell v Samuel Jackson
There are many things I don’t like about the X Factor, but amongst them is what its presence has come to definitively signify: the official end of summer. In association with the appearance of the karaoke related television programme in homes across Britain, is the tiresome discussion around the “Battle for the Xmas Number 1” […]
Star Wars and postmodernism
One of the first articles I wrote for this site was a re-imagining of Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Funnily, it’s actually quite painful to have to type out those words, “Phantom Menace”, not out of anything like a “George Lucas ruined my childhood” type vibe, but just because even after having seen the […]
The greatest obscure novel ever written: Fuck Yes! By Wing Fu Fing
At some point in my early twenties, I was at an extremely dull party. That’s an essential part of being in your early twenties, at least that was my experience of it, attending boring parties. Mostly because you haven’t figured out what’s what quite yet and can’t discern the shit from the shinola. Or at […]