Last weekend saw two marches of protest in the UK. By far the largest and most reported was the march in London for a People’s Vote on the final terms of Brexit. ‘Hundreds of thousands’ is the reported scale, comparable with the estimated 750,000 who marched in 2003 to stop the war in Iraq, with […] Read more
Political rants
14thJuly 2018. I’m on the deck of a Stena line ferry – stern end. The sun is shining, its warm and I’m watching England’s east coast retreat into the morning haze. It feels good, like an escape. We’re heading for Holland, then Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Italy and France. Seven of the twenty seven EU countries […] Read more
There’s been this thing in recent weeks on Facebook where people nominate friends to list three positive things in their day – or things in their life they are grateful for. For five consecutive days . One of my friends issued veiled threats, via her FB status, to anyone who nominated her for this challenge, […] Read more
As somebody who isn’t very interested in sport, I nonetheless get pretty excited about Olympic Games. Against my better judgement actually, given all the corporate flannel that wraps them. Four years ago I went with some colleagues out to Vancouver during the Winter Paralympics, and very impressive and energising it was. Vancouver and Whistler, the […] Read more
I’m sure I’m not the only person to have a problem with all this talk of the ‘Living Wage’. Not as a concept or a principle by which a decent society runs, but as a subject which needs discussing at all. It’s one of those pieces of language that’s used without really thinking about what […] Read more
A few months ago I was travelling back from Manchester with friends after seeing a show, realising that the last three small-scale/ experimental/ emerging artist performance pieces we had seen had grandparents at the centre of their narrative. The writers’ grandparents. Or fictional ones. We’d just Seen Dancing With The Orange Dog by the 154 […] Read more
