The flock of the new

New! Latest! Unseen! New! Why this obsession with the new? Magazines look the same every month, as they all review the same “new” movies and cds. Why not have a publication which reviews old stuff? Our culture’s back catalogue is full to bursting with interesting work, and yet we only ever seem interested in the [...]

The shock of the old

One of the pleasantest (yes, that is a word…as of now) experiences I’ve had when listening to music is rediscovering something I thought I already knew well. Some of my favourite albums seem to reveal new aspects almost every time I listen to them. The very fact that I feel that I know a piece of [...]

Look at me

Jing Di, Emperor of China (157-141 B.C., Han dynasty), was considered so sacred that most people couldn’t even bring themselves to use his name, and so he was often referred to as “Foot of the Stair”, because when in his presence you couldn’t look any higher than the bottom stair of his dais. Imagine going [...]

Target Audience

The other day I was watching a drama in which a single mother went to hospital having gone into labour for her second baby. Her first child, a girl of about 8 years of age, was with her, and as the mother received her epidural, a social worker gently explained that, as the daughter couldn’t [...]

Tell us the one about…

I don’t usually do requests (because, well, I don’t usually get them), but a friend suggested I tell a particular story from my past. It hadn’t occurred to me that it would be of any interest to anyone, so if it bores or annoys you, blame him. Names have been changed to protect the guilty. This [...]

More than words

On the way in to work this morning I was listening to a cd and one track in particular (my favourite, “Ha Uma Musica Da Povo”) moved me almost to tears. There are few pieces of music that can do this (other examples being Tori Amos’ “Winter” and Radiohead’s “Let Down”), but what is unusual about this one is [...]

Blind spot

Why can’t you see? Well, not everyone can. Plenty of people, including friends and family members, suffer some form of sight defect, even if it’s only slight short-sightedness. And yet I find it very difficult to get my head around this most common of disabilities. Being able to see the world is, for me, so fundamental [...]

Take a pill

The other day I saw a public information poster exhorting stressed drivers to consider fellow road users. The photo was of a box of eggs, painted and decorated to look like people, and the phrase at the top read “On the road we are all fragile”. But my favourite part was the tagline running along [...]

Weirdy beardy

I hate shaving (I guess you could say it’s a pain in the neck, ha ha). Every morning I try to judge whether I can go to work with that little extra stubble – will anyone notice or care, or do I have to spend ten minutes lathering and scraping in order to make myself [...]

Proscenium Ark

I went to the theatre last night, but it’s kind of hard to tell you what I saw. It’s called “La Veillée des Abysses“, and it’s a mixture of dance, theatre, slapstick, acrobatics and music. You can see some clips here. Others (both paid and unpaid critics) have described it better than I can, but let’s [...]