From The Kitchen Table

Category: Kitchen Table Chat

  • Browsing in Blackwell’s

    Blackwells must be the world’s best bookshop, surely? I know that lots of people have favourite bookshops but I feel pretty lucky that Blackwells mother ship in Oxford is my local. I go there to soothe my soul. It’s a Russian doll of a shop – eccentric at first sight because the shop front has…

  • English spoken here

    I’ve just come back from a few days in France where it rained a bit and the food was good and the company even better and where I hardly spoke French at all. I used to speak reasonable French but it’s been a while since I’ve needed to use it and heavens, I sometimes have…

  • School report – could do better.

    A school friend of mine told me that one reason among many that the university I work for is a serious establishment is that has no truck with media studies. It seems to me that whenever people want to decry an academic discipline it’s always media and communications that they pick on as evidence of…

  • By consent

    Round-up: Police and people need to have trust in one another or policing with consent is lost, and with it, security in our society. This is the short read of this rather rambling post. I know what I want to say but can’t quite work out how to say it (at least, not in under…

  • Unaccompanied drinking – tales from old Brixton

    We had a deal, my father and me. And the deal was that we wouldn’t drink in each others’ pubs unless invited. As it happened I doubt if he would have drunk in any of my pubs, even if had asked him to either of my locals, the Pied Bull in Streatham or the pub…

  • Return from the far side

    On the wall of one of the offices where I work there is a map of social networks and on that there is a far-off shoreline which is labelled “the land of defunct social networks”. I’m only surprised there isn’t a tiny off-shore island marked with the name of my own oeuvre. However, I’ve decided…

  • 20 years on

    I hope you can read the words from the base of the statue outside Nelson Mandela’s last prison standing where he walked into the world 20 years ago – if not, a double click might do it.

  • The Old Man was here

    I said there’d more about South Africa. So here is a little story to mark the 20th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s release. One afternoon in August as the South African winter began to think about spring, G and I were driving along a road, on our way back from a winery near Franschhoek when we…

  • Thought for the day

    In her column on possible New Year resolutions for political leaders, Jackie Ashley made two for David Cameron, our possible next Prime Minister, the first of which reads “.. start being nicer to “the little people” – the makeup artists, photographers, drivers, bag-carriers and all the other slightly fuzzy attendants in the background. You aren’t…

  • On the trail of the lonesome Pyke

    Here’s a bit more about a story I wrote last year in March 2008 concerning my great-aunt’s autograph book. One of the entries was contributed by Alfred L Pyke of the 17th Fusiliers when he was her patient in 1917. Thanks to the power of the Internet I found out some more about Alfred Pyke.…