It can be useful to sit in someone else’s chair every now and again, if only to scuttle back with relief to your own. I’ve been sitting in B. S. Johnson’s seat this week, imagining his frustration at having his experimental novels widely praised but rarely bought. Johnson’s finest work, The Unfortunates, published in […]
It’s easier to see how brilliant Charles Dickens is by reading a lesser rival. Just as it’s simpler to appreciate home by going away, silence by listening to Sir Paul McCartney and freshly caught fish by eating tinned tuna. For that reason here are some pink/crimson/red things eaten and enjoyed in my house in the […]
There was a phase in the 1970s when interior design ran riot. I remember my grandpa announcing proudly that he’d decorated the walls of his small front room with four wildly different wallpapers and picked out the woodwork in egg-yolk yellow. I thought of my grandpa as I walked around David Hockney’s new exhibition A […]
It amuses me to see fashion stores from Zara to Benetton to Topshop packed with rails of military capes this season. How did the cape survive its first outing, let alone get resurrected? I remember pleading for one as a teenager, along with a pair of white pull-on wet-look knee-length boots. I eventually got the […]
