From The Kitchen Table

Category: Kitchen Table Chat

  • Alan Johnston and his ilk

    When I heard on Sunday that a group which calls itself the Tawd and Jihad brigades claimed to have killed Alan Johnston I involuntarily gasped. My son, who had not been following the news asked me why and I unleashed a polemic aimed at the heavens about the self-destructive hubristic idiocy of such an action…

  • Something better to do

    On Friday, Peter Mandelson didn’t turn up for Radio 4’s Any Questions and Jonathan Dimbleby wasn’t making excuses for him. Pointing out that Mandelson had cried off on the basis that he had to give a speech in Istanbul Dimbleby also mentioned that we might have caught Peter giving a radio interview the day before…

  • A place to call home

    The Daily Telegraph has become exercised about the housing shortage. Apparently houses worth over £2 million are being kept off the market because their owners can’t find anywhere to downsize to. I’m aware of this problem because my brother and his partner could sell their house in Croydon, have found the house they want in…

  • Job done (not)

    Reading in the Observer last Sunday of the apparent poor treatment, verging on neglect, of the soldiers being treated at Selly Oak hospital was truly dispiriting. For blessed baby boomers like me it seems incredible that anyone in hospital should suffer the way that was reported in the newspaper – young men lying in soiled…

  • Walking home through wonderland

    I have an ambiguous relationship with Oxford, where I live but today it was unequivocally beautiful. I walked back from work along one of the loveliest parts of the university city, along a gravel path which runs from a cobbled street between two ancient colleges. From one college I could hear someone playing gentle jazz…

  • The curse of the kitchen table Pt 1

    Note my pique in above posting concerning security in Chicago. So it’s not just me. Ewan MacAskill reports in the Guardian so it must be true.

  • Prima Donnas and dons

    Over the last six years I’ve worked with a lot of journalists from all over the world. I like journalists, I like their enquiry and focus and mordant sense of humour. I’ve met journalists who risk their lives to follow up stories and some who live outside their own countries for fear of their lives.…

  • Can this be right?

    It’s Friday night and I am the equivalent of the little old lady driving home from church except it was the book club where in true Oxford style we’d been discussing modern French literature (and one of our number had read the book in the original French) Anyway, drink had been taken in the most…

  • The Joys of Undiscovered Places

    One of the things that I miss from my party political days is the chance to travel to towns for conferences and meetings that otherwise I would have no reason to go to. Discovering Scarborough was a real joy (although I must admit I have never been back) This weekend I have to go to…