Inhabitants of the inner city have to take their country pleasures where they find them. So my sons' going to a supervised birthday in Stoke Newington provided an opportunity for a stroll around the more bucolic parts of the district. The party was held at Pirates Playhouse, a many-storied soft-play centre ... Read More...

Continuing our series looking at great paintings housed in London's National Gallery... The National Gallery is not short of big, attention-grabbing showpieces, but there are also small, unassuming pictures that can stop you in your tracks and compel your attention just as effectively. One that I often return to is this still ... Read More...

Toby Ash (neither the author nor the subject of this post but another) Dabbler Correspondent Toby Ash needs to get some Bar Mitzvah guilt off his chest, thinks we are all only a couple of keystrokes away from ruination and has a top tip for cashing in on Hanukkah. A few years ... Read More...

I've no problem with serious music being used to enrich film and other art forms, but what tends to grate is when pop musicians get ideas above their station, and start trying to sell me their concept of the 'classics' - a handful of horrors that spring to mind are ... Read More...

One of my resolutions for 2011 is that every time I complain about something, I preface my sentence with “I’m not complaining, but…” thus enabling me to discover exactly how much I do complain. I’m not complaining, but…it’s come to my attention that The Dabbler is rather male-orientated in the ... Read More...

// // ]]> Through cultural osmosis it's become something we can perhaps all identify with - the 'badlands' of New Jersey. The poisonous brown swamp that flashes past in the opening credits of The Sopranos, reeds and factories, chimneys and motels. Fly-tipping and gangster hits. The footnote of the city, the ... Read More...

A number of errors and infelicities crept in to our summary last week of prognostications from Old Key’s Almanacke for 2011. This was due to some interference in the mystic communiqué channels, probably the wrong sort of ectoplasm on the line. An inaccurate almanacke is a worthless thing, so it ... Read More...

Via Stan Madeley I discover this marvellous cartoon by Kliban. The world can be divided into two types of people: those who like to divide the world into two types of people and those who don’t. I firmly belong in the latter camp, but nonetheless the world can be divided into ... Read More...

Yes, it's a highly entertaining trove of show-business anecdotes. Yes, it's a great tale of a boy made good (and bad), the son of America's first racially-integrated dentist - lauded in Harlem but nowhere else - who achieved Hollywood fame with all its trappings. Yes, it's the inside (and disputed) story of ... Read More...

In a special mini-series which we're calling 'The Football Fan Delusion', sports psychologist and blogger James Hamilton challenges some of soccer's most popular assumptions. This week he tackles the English myth of Passion and Commitment... I’m not sure when or where I first heard the phrase “passion and commitment.” Sometime after ... Read More...