Category: Kitchen Table Chat
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Off the beaten track
My son’s special girl teaches drama in a part of Birmingham called Dudley. Natives of Dudley have a very particular accent. They pronounce the name of their home something like “dood-lay”. I think it’s probably a Dudley accent that people think of when they say that a Birmingham accent is along with Liverpool, the most…
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Waking up to money
Apart from the snow, the story of the past few days and probably for a few more will be the bonuses that banks are planning to pay their “top” executives. The people whose expertise was such that the banks had to be taken over by the state – virtually nationalized. For years I Woke up…
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I know it works in practice but does it work in theory?
Look, look. This is me. Read this piece in the Guardian that I found last week. For more than a year I’ve been feeling an inadequate blogger because although I shout at the radio every morning about some perceived outrage or the other, I then get on and out and off to work and the…
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Those were the days
Gosh, I’m coming all over retro. The pre-recession atmosphere speaks to my waste- not-want- not side; newspaper articles about how home cooking, which I do already, is the new eating out, eschewing plastic bags, which I have done for years, and not flying away for weekend breaks, is the right and also fashionable thing to…
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Fizz has left the building
My best cat, Fizz died this week, from kidney failure, the curse of cats. He was born on the sofa in our front room (although not the same sofa as I now have guests will be relieved to know) and effervesced into the world with such vibrancy that we gave him Fizzy as a temporary…
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Post-festival fugue
This is a dangerous time for me. When I begin to get over the expense of the Edinburgh festival and, in this case, the extreme dampness. When friends ask how it was and I say “great” and when they ask me to let them know when I’m sorting out next year, I don’t say “What!?…
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Having a bit of a McLaugh
Scotland does like to have tartan with everything. I listen to the radio in the night a lot because I don’t sleep well and normally I switch between Radio 5 and the World Service but in Scotland it seems to be all Scottish programmes – Fred McCauley who is a great comic but seemed to…