For today's Lazy Sunday, Worm lowers the temperature with some icy tunes to listen to under a duvet... Brrrrrrr. For symmetry's sake we all wish The Bleak Midwinter happened at Christmas, yet every year without fail the coldest snap seems to arrive this time in February. Its not exactly Siberia out ... Read More...

Whether you celebrate it or not, Valentine’s Day is becoming more commercial every year. And it seems to be getting weirder too. With just a few days to go, here are some gruesome gift ideas that will send a shudder down your spine… First up, from Ireland, a cojoined twins pin ... Read More...

Another strange bookshop discovery prompts Nige to ponder a great publisher who couldn't spell... The charity shop where I happened on that indispensable volume, The Making Of A Moron, came up with the goods again soon after, when my browsing eye was caught by the title Far Away and Long Ago ... Read More...

What better way to spend a cold Friday evening in February than to curl up in front of the television to watch a trilogy of films by one of the great unsung auteurs of the silent screen?... The cable channel UK Golden Pap is to be congratulated for screening the masterworks ... Read More...

This week Jonathon goes walking in a winter wonderland, as he considers how slang deals with the cold... Le soleil brille and le ciel est bleu but like so many things this is both snare and delusion and a glance at the thermometer says -9° Celsius which is not good news ... Read More...

Every month we award a bottle of Glengoyne 10 year old single malt - the finest whisky available to humanity - to a commenter who tickles our fancy... One thing we like about this place is the way you get introduced to characters you wouldn't otherwise come across. Till Lindemann (bottom), for instance, ... Read More...

Elberry reads an illuminating biography of a 'cocky, mordant, determined' playwright... Ben Jonson had the misfortune to be a late 16th Century English playwright. Who would read one of Jonson's diligently allegorical plays if he could read Hamlet or King Lear? Certainly, at first glance Jonson seems a lumbering, uninteresting writer, ... Read More...

Next year (yes, we thought we’d get in first) will be the centenary of the birth of food writer Elizabeth David who, Toby Ash believes, still has more to offer the modern domestic kitchen than all of today’s celebrity chefs put together. I just can’t imagine Elizabeth David stealing from Tesco. ... Read More...

The Atlas of Norbiton is a weekly bulletin from Norbiton: Ideal City of the Failed Life. Unlike its more comprehensive, detailed and discursive mother site, the Anatomy of Norbiton - hailed by Nige as "a thing of strange beauty and wonder, inspired by the South London nowhere known as Norbiton" - the Atlas is intended as a pocket guide to ... Read More...

Congratulations to a brace of slangy Dabbler victors... Congratulations are in order today - first to our very own Mr Slang, Jonathon Green, whose mighty Green's Dictionary of Slang - the epic 3-volume culmination of a life's work - has won the Dartmouth Medal for 2011. This is the prize awarded ... Read More...