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Notes on a train
A recent trip to Oxfordshire let me try out the recently-refurbished 'GWR' trains, introduced after First Great Western rebranded to their historical title of Great Western Railways, a rebrand so exhaustive they've designed their new trains for 19th century body shapes. →
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A misanthrope abroad
Back in 2010 I wrote about how hard I found it to go on holiday for a variety of reasons, but the last few years has seen me get steadily more adventurous, though not so adventurous that I don't retain my inherent hostility towards people the entire time I'm away. People don't get suddenly more tolerable just because I'm carrying Euros instead of Pounds, so my holidays tend to be structured to avoid other people as much as possible while still staying within the walls of civilisation, with its soothing flow of coffee and reassuring presence of flushing toilets. →
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Dictionaries
The news that several authors and naturalists wrote a distressed open letter to plead that a collection of nature words removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary — catkin, acorn, pansy, etc. — be reinstated has made me think of McDonalds. →
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Fat January
January is the most miserable month of the year. It's dark when you leave for work and it's dark when you leave for home. It's properly cold, and not the bullshit December cold where it never drops below 13C, but serious, gale-force windchill cold with sleet, rain, and snow. You don't have any money because you got your last salary on December 20th and you've already spent it because you're terrible at managing your own finances. There's nothing to look forward to in January except the end of January. →
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Reading women
Around the start of last year I was performing my annual "Stroking of the books" ritual, where I saunter around my living room admiring my collection and my tremendously good taste in literature. I paused to stroke the largely-unread collection of Dickens' Penguin Clothbound Classics, I gritted my teeth at the irritatingly mis-matched, incomplete and incomprehensible set of Prousts, I briefly fondled my expansive collection of BFI monographs on serious, important films such as The Big Lebowski, and I stopped to feel the weight of my oversized books on film poster history and the Sega MegaDrive. I made my annual resolution to re-read books more often, and then promptly forgot all the books on my shelves in favour of reading something new. →
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The cinema at the end of the world
Welcome news this week that the Shaftesbury Avenue Cineworld, a cinema that looked and felt like it had only narrowly survived the apocalypse, is to close and be refurbished into a seven-screen Picturehouse, the only other option being to take off and nuke the site from orbit, just to be sure. →
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Amsterdam
After four barely-tolerable days in Brussels, taking in all the graffiti and scaffolding that the city had to offer, I did better with four days in Amsterdam, trading concrete and roadworks for picturesque canals and a laid-back, friendly, tolerant atmosphere. Finally, here was a city I could feel at home in; a city where everyone would leave me alone because they were all too busy getting high or getting laid. →
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Brussels
To sum up Brussels with one anecdote: the Palace of Justice, built between 1866 and 1883 by Joseph Poelaert and the largest building constructed in the 19th century, sits opposite my hotel, covered in scaffolding and seemingly disused. The renovation of this building has been so slow that in 2013 it was discovered that the scaffolding itself was now also in need of renovation. →
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The Non-swimmer
I discovered a walking route home that takes me along a canal and shaves 20 minutes off my journey time. It's a route that's peaceful, practically deserted, and neatly cuts out almost the whole of Camden. A 45 minute walk where I can, for a short time, forget that I'm in London; the advantages of this just have to be weighed against the terror caused by being a non-swimmer mere inches away from an open body of deep, cold water. →
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Acclimatising
Being a long-serving bachelor, and with British weather helpfully providing me with a plausible excuse for not travelling, I traditionally spend Christmas alone, and when I say "Christmas" I actually mean about three weeks, starting a week ahead of the day itself and ending a few days into the new year. No expectations of going out, enough food and drink to feed about three of me, and so many films, games and books that I'd do ok keeping occupied on a return trip to Mars. Solitude and over-consumption; what a magical time of year it is. →
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Getting a haircut
Like most metrosexual males, I get my hair cut at a hair salon. I stopped going to a barber after too many years of having my request for a grade 2 undercut blindly accepted when what I actually needed was an intervention of some kind. Hang on, are we still called metrosexuals? I lose track. →
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The upper deck
I regularly use the bus to get around London on the grounds that the Tube is a place where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. Tiring recently of the limited seating on the lower deck of the bus and the constant ethical dilemma about whether to stand for the elderly disabled pregnant woman or just keep on sitting like every other cold-hearted bastard Londoner, I risked a trip to the upper deck, a deck previously avoided because of the belief that you only sat upstairs if you wanted to be murdered by schoolchildren. →
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Notes from the Regent Street Apple store iPad queue
I had ordered an iPad online but the delivery date wasn't for a full month, which is bullshit. What's the point of being a fat, entitled Westerner if I have to wait a month for something? As I was passing the Regent Street Apple shop I decided to see if buying one in person was possible. This was two days after the launch so I'd imagined the masses would have dispersed, though the hundreds of thousands of March 26 protesters might have taken the opportunity to stock up as well. →
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Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger examines how humanity has used technology to augment human memory over the ages, and how we are now entering a period where technology gives us near-perfect memory through digital archives. He argues that this is an abnormal situation for our societies, and that we ought to be finding ways in which we can facilitate forgetting rather than remembering. →
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Snap, crackle and pop
I was in a pub the other day that had a record player behind the bar. On it was playing an old Ella Fitzgerald album, and it had all the hissing, bass and crackle on it that vinyl aficionados harp on about. It was nice. It lacked the pristine sound quality of digital music; its analogue nature told a story. →
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This is how I go on holiday
It's a mystery to me how anybody manages to go on any holiday, ever, given the range of destinations on offer. Aside from a few warzones -- and even they will likely offer some sort of human-shield package tour -- the budding traveller can go anywhere on Earth. How does anybody ever pick a destination? Literally the entire planet to choose from. I can barely manage to choose which loaf of bread I want. →
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London Underground
Too many bad experiences on the London Underground have given me cause to abandon it entirely; now I get around London via walking or bus alone. →
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Why BBC 6 Music matters
BBC Director General Mark Thompson has recommended to the BBC Trust that digital radio station 6 Music be closed down. As someone who has religiously tuned into this station since it first started broadcasting a decade ago, I'm a bit upset by this. →
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My first 999
I was once again near a traffic accident, though this time I'm not taking the blame as I wasn't thinking about anything much at the time beyond the lyrics to Nancy Sinatra's Some Velvet Morning. What made this accident notable, though, was that this time I was first on the scene. Aside from the victim, obviously. →
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I went to the theatre
Recently I wrote about how the theatre was this odd, unfamiliar world, so full of strange terminology and mad prices that it left me cold and confused. In the name of investigative journalism I decided I should at least give it a go before writing it off. I ponyed up the extortionate ticket price for a front-row seat at Breakfast at Tiffany's and off I went. →