The art of flushonomics
The problem with the credit crunch is that it either takes away your ability to savour the finer things in the life, or makes you feel guilty about enjoying them when you are savouring them. Whether the object of your affection is a rich and decadent chocolate cake or a sleek and sophisticated flat screen [...]
There’s honour among thieves
As a great philosopher once wrote, “we had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun.” Well to be honest, it was the Belgian songwriter Jacques Brel, but he sounds like a philosopher so that’s close enough for me. My suspicion – based admittedly on one trip to Antwerp nearly ten years ago [...]
How to know everything there is to know
One thing that makes a New Yorker stand out from the crowd is their absolute stubborn refusal to accept that they could ever be wrong. You could be an undisputed world expert in a particularly obscure field of quantum physics, and yet you would still find a New York street cleaner who’d be more than [...]
A very male kind of illness
I’m rarely very ill. In more than fifteen years of working, I’ve probably had no more than twenty days off sick. That’s not to say that I don’t get sick at all – it’s just that I’m likely to drag myself into work despite various aches and pains, in some kind of martyr-ish attempt to [...]
Reasons why America is great (part 5 of a series)
You know me as a sophisticated Brit about town, so it may shock you to learn that I didn’t live in a (permanent) home that had a purpose built shower until I was in my 30s. Sure, there were the grim shower blocks at university, or the occasional “shower attached to the tapsfaucet” that would [...]
Baby you can park my car
I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Americans are obsessed with their cars. Having recently flown cross-country to Los Angeles, it’s not hard to see why. Popping next door for a cup of sugar must be a whole different kettle of fish when your closest neighbour lives thirty miles away. Of course, abject fear [...]
The big breakfast. Or lunch.
I’ve never really got the point of brunch, to be honest. For a start, I’m no fan of breakfast, despite the impassioned pleas of around three quarters of the people I’ve ever met who insist that it’s the most important meal of the day and I might die at the age of 54 if I [...]
Will humankind ever learn?
I’ve always been a little bit superstitious, for some reason. To be fair, I’d like to think that I’m just easily suggestible, and that the people around me have lured me into their shadowy lair of hocus pocus claptrap done in the name of good luck. Nevertheless, my lack of backbone leads to me doing [...]
Public displays of affection
I can’t help but love the story of the British government flying the Union Jack the wrong way up at the signing of a trade agreement with China. It’s the kind of Basil Fawlty-esque commitment to getting things ever so slightly wrong that marks the UK out from the rest of the world. Actually, it’s [...]
And next on the agenda…
I have a new obsession. Some people get caught up with endless musing on Heidi Klum or Brad Pitt. Others take to hobbies from skateboarding to knitting like ducks to water, and spend many an hour boring friends on their latest jump or – erm – stitch. And some become couch potatoes, frantically racing home [...]
