Worm guides us through the jerry-built plotlands of Great Britain... Plotlands began in the 1870's as a way for speculators to offload marginal farmland as Britain's agrarian populace uprooted en masse to the big cities. Whether barren or dangerously flood prone, worthless land was portioned up and sold off square by ... Read More...
Month: August 2013
Jonathon fibs you right in the claret-spout with his fambler, as he examines slang's obsession with fisticuffs... Unlike slang's women, slang's men do not scold. And nag? heaven forfend. Men shout. Loud, vain, futile. All that stuff. Gobshites, basically. But men also hit. How do I wallop thee, let me count the ... Read More...
Michael ‘Peter Simple’ Wharton’s The Missing Will and A Dubious Codicil can be bought for a penny in a single volume, but, as Brit writes, it’s very much an autobiography of two halves... The Missing Will is a hoot, covering with deadpan wit Wharton’s childhood in 1920s Yorkshire, his remarkably indolent, drunken Oxford ... Read More...
Dabblers will know that Noseybonk applied the principles of gamesmanship to the internet age in his Blogmanship book. From our friends at Slightly Foxed magazine, here's author Andrew Martin on the original 'Upmanship' books of Stephen Potter... I first encountered the work of Stephen Potter in a TV sketch show that conflated the great ... Read More...
Football fan violence was far from an invention of the 1980s... It’s one of the most extraordinary and tantalizing facts of our time. Take out all the estimated-to-be-drug-related activity out of the crime figures, and what you are left with are the gentle, pacific, Marpleian levels of fair-cop crime enjoyed in ... Read More...
Dabbler editor Gaw explains his role in the popularisation of one of Britain's finest dishes, the Balti... Accompanied by a family-nan, there is surely no more restorative, tasty and cheap meal to be found anywhere than a Balti. It means 'bucket' in Hindi, and was invented in Birmingham. I gather it's ... Read More...
Toby Ash makes an unexpected and bizarre discovery amongst the golf courses and white washed villas of Portugal’s Algarve.... The Algarve is not on most people’s cultural map. Lazing about in the sun, a round of golf, Cliff Richard-spotting perhaps, but it’s not a great place for museums or galleries. Well, that’s ... Read More...
Brit's Dabbler Diary is taking an August break. So here, by popular demand, is a repeat of the one of the most memorable posts ever to appear on The Dabbler: the anti-diary, in which Mr Slang takes stroll through Great Wen and calls for Armageddon... Some Lord’s day. I know not ... Read More...
There is much more to contemporary serious music than Alan Titchmarsh's choices on Classic FM. Mahlerman selects some 'post-minimalist' composers who should stand the test of time... Look, let's get one thing straight, I have got nothing against Dr Karl Jenkins, the most performed living composer in the world. Before the doctorate and ... Read More...
Every week I traipse around Wikipedia looking for the strangest articles I can find, before regurgitating them here for your pleasure. This week's unusual find makes me feel quite thirsty for some reason... In political discourse, if-by-whiskey is a ‘relative fallacy’ where the response to a question relies upon the questioner’s ... Read More...
