From The Kitchen Table

Category: Kitchen Table Chat

  • Wild about wildlife

    I can’t quite work out why AA Gill would want to tell everyone that he’d killed a baboon to find out how it felt, but I have met quite a few people who would like to kill a baboon. In the summer, when we stayed in the winelands of the Western Cape we took the…

  • Remembering Mary Stott

    Way back when the SDP was a proper party fighting a General Election, I met Mary Stott who arrived at our HQ in an old off-licence in deepest South East London and rolled up her sleeves and stuffed envelopes for our candidate, who was her friend Polly Toynbee, and made tea and talked deep good…

  • From somewhere near the middle of England

    I had a day off today so I went down to Burford. I’ve already mentioned that I live alongside some of the most beautiful countryside in England. Burford is the essence of Cotswold village set along a hill with a High street that drops between stone houses essentially unchanged externally for three hundred years, and…

  • They do things differently

    It’s not just the past that is another country where they do things differently – other countries are also places where they do things differently. In South Africa where I’ve just spent 12 great days I noticed that by great cliffs or by swimming pools there are warning notices. And they warn that anyone who…

  • A Duck story

    I’ve always been very fond of ducks. They’re essentially rather jolly creatures I always think and I like that slightly aggrieved brurk brurk noise they make. The ducklings are essence of cute, the males are blokey in a duck sort of a way and the females always seem busy and slightly cross. When I was…

  • Ramblings from the sick bed

    I’ve been off sick for a couple of days and in between bouts of feverish sleep I’ve passed the time by listening to the news and watching television programmes on my laptop. Today the 7th British soldier this week died in Helmand- another day, another death. When ex-President Bush sent troops into Afghanistan I remember…

  • A sense of proportion

    It is a matter of sadness to me that I am unlikely to see any system of proportional representation come about for Westminster elections in my lifetime. It seems a long time since I was heavily committed to campaigns to change our voting system – hell, it is a long time since the early 80s…

  • ..lude sing cuckoo

    A young colleague of mine arrived at work on May morning and told me that she’d just been assaulted by a Morris dancer! I think she was more surprised than upset at having been slapped on the bottom by a man with flowers in his hat, bells on at his knees and smile on his…

  • Swan’s black

    On the way home from listening to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown talk about her book, the Settlers Cookbook, I glanced over the bridge and there, floating around was a swan. A black swan. This is becoming a bit of a theme I know but I was completely struck by this gorgeous creature looking so exotic and almost…

  • Swan’s gone

    It was a perfectly normal walk to work yesterday except that as I approached Folly Bridge I saw, lying on a low wall, a swan. A dead swan, its neck elegantly elongated and its feet curled. It didn’t seem at all marked but it was dead all right. All the way to work I thought…