Thoughts On ‘The Story Of The Jam: About The Young Idea.’

I was never a mod. Too awkward, too uncertain, too utterly lacking in cool or style, too scared of my own shadow. But I loved The Jam. Absolutely bloody loved them. I remember thinking — and saying — and believing — that, in the…

Balaclava

Blue, fluffy, two sizes two small, I wore it every morning for a while, looking like a very small, uncertain IRA man, though I like to think now I made balaclavas cool long before terrorists did. Bafflingly, its unbelievable itchiness, its Napoleonic harshness, the way it made me almost unrecognisable but…

An Accidental Man

A couple of years ago, Kingston University bought hundreds of Iris Murdoch’s letters. When I heard about this, I emailed The Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies (oh yes), arranged a time to go down there, underwent a rigorous examination of my motives that included waterboarding and being forced to…

Eleven Things A Brit Must Do In The USA

1. Begin at Newark. Don’t pay the extra for a sat nav. The hire car will take you to a disused-warehousey, cardboard-boxey, burning-trashcanny, wet-and-windy wasteground: death-dark, Shakespearean, haunted by Scorsesan ghosts. Panic, just long enough and hard…

General Election

I was reading Cendrars this morning, on the tube, like you do

if you still harbour childhood fantasies of becoming French at the age of fifty-three, a real poet with a jaunty cap and a scarf and Gitanes, or if you still harbour childhood fantasies of finding meaning and…

Je Suis?

So I try to work out what I think and I try to work out what I feel and I realise I think nothing and feel nothing I could possibly be proud of next year. Or even tomorrow.

And this is what they want.

White (From Something About England, December 2010)

I scraped the snow from the weather-buried car this morning, opened the door,
sat down in the driver’s seat. For a couple of minutes, there was no traffic,
no sound: a pre-industrial peace. The calm stillness was pricked, suddenly, by a…