It may be galling to many people hacked off at news of journalists playing fast-and-loose with personal mobile phone data, but the recent news of the police playing fast-and-loose with the freedom of the press in Britain should be no comfort either. If it will help provide a sense of perspective, try for a moment…
Doreen Lawrence states in today’s Times that in her opinion Britain is no less a racist society than it was 21 years ago when her son Stephen was murdered in southeast London. And she’s probably right. A ranking officer in the Metropolitan Police told me less than a few years ago how police officers always…
God loves a tryer. Gordon “Grodon” Brown – unstable former PM, dad, hubby and MP (in the English parliament) for Kircaldy & Cowdenbeath – was recently described in The Grauniad as being the UK’s best hope for a No vote in the upcoming referendum on independence. But Mr Brown lacks the sensitivity to keep his…
They found a statue of Elvis Presley on mars. It must be true – it was in the newspaper! Britain’s tackiest ever tabloid really outshone itself with the ‘Elvis scoop’ in October 1989. It’s easy to laugh it off, but the law of averages says that someone, somewhere (and quite likely much more than a…
Regular readers of my blog (Facebook page, Twitter feeds, LinkedIn posts) know how I make a living. The contemporary writer faces a number of obstacles that are greater and fewer in number than many professionals in these interesting times, but chief among these for me (today, at least) is the dilemma of meeting demand with…
An accident & emergency department in the north of England last Monday admitted a 13 year-old girl with injuries that implied self-harming. The motivations for young people to do this are varied, but in this case it was being bullied at school that led to the hospital admission. It is disheartening that occurrences like this…
Political laziness and insouciance threaten more than popular disaffection with the process, but the very existence of the franchise itself, as politicians’ bad behaviour rubs off on their constituents. There are many reasons people grow disaffected with politics. And I’m lucky enough to have been given a new aspect into this, as our teenage twins…
I was fortunate enough to learn my trade in a time and place where that trade was a mysterious black art. Getting a job was easy. Getting my own way was easier still. Imagine my alarm when it transpired everyone had become a writer, and that I was no longer special at all. All those…
If you spend any time trawling freelance job sites like People Per Hour or Elance as a seller or a buyer, you appreciate how shocking is the divide in communication skills between the haves and have-nots. Just this morning I clicked the ‘learn more’ link on a job abstract, only to see the message that…
We’re reminded today by David Aaronovitch in the Times of why care with English usage and knowing the rules is more than simple pedantry or being ‘cute’. And it echoes what I’ve been saying for years – some might say ad nauseam, that in allowing the governing clerical classes to get away with bad English…