Dabbler Diary – The Fourth Wall

I’m afraid I’ve never been able to take Wales seriously. My troubles begin, shallowly, with the bilingual road signs, which are funny if the Welsh is very different from the English (Please drive carefully - Gryywch yn ofalus) and even funnier if it is similar (Millennium Stadium - Stadiwm y ... Read More...

Dabbler Diary – For the birds

Saturday was Owl Day at the Speedwell Children’s Centre so we took the girls along. Bob the owl man looked like an owl. That sort of thing happens far too often to ascribe it all to coincidence, doesn’t it? Ken Livingstone looks like a newt. Same with aptronyms. Strong and ... Read More...

Dabbler Diary – Come As You Are

But they will not go to bed. Long after lights out the pitter-patters and thump-thumps of strange games can be heard in their bedroom. Conspiratorial murmurings. Earnest discussions about meerkats. Then the whine of the gate and the pit-pats along the landing to the top of the stairs where they ... Read More...

Dabbler Diary – Plastic Scouser

To Liverpool, a foreign island city-state that somehow got itself attached to mainland England. An ‘island’ because, as with the fauna of Galapagos, it has evolved in isolation into something very strange. Let’s start with the voices. It is widely believed that there is a ‘Scouse accent’. In fact there ... Read More...

Dabbler Diary – A Kingdom of Rains

Il pleut. I must resort to French; ‘it is raining’ is too drably familiar to describe February’s pluvial onslaught. I need words of one syllable; words that can be spat; words at one remove, sufficiently alien for the deluge that has amphibianised our villages, turned our lowlands into swamplands and ... Read More...

Dabbler Diary – The Shoreditch Iago

Waking before dawn I first reached for my phone to check on England’s latest reassuringly routine cricket thrashing by Australia, then groaned out of bed to descend and in the kitchen force tea and toast into unwelcoming guts. Twice since the last diary I have had long work days in ... Read More...

Dabbler Diary – Flying Low

‘One adult for The Hobbit in 3D, please,” I said, thus setting the bar pretty high for the Saddest Thing Uttered in 2014 contest. It can’t be helped: a residue of youthful Tolkein geekdom means that a part of me will always yearn for the world of dragons and pointy-eared ... Read More...

Dabbler Diary – Janus Face

“Happy New Year!” we say to one another, but do we say it in optimistic expectation or in fearful hopes: beseeching Fate that 2014 is not the year when one’s ordained calamity strikes? A bit of both, but increasingly the latter as we accumulate more new years, I suppose. We ... Read More...

Sicilian Diary

Toby Ash has just enjoyed a long weekend in Palermo. Just don’t mention the M word... From the moment you land, it’s pretty hard to avoid the mafia in Sicily. Palermo’s Falcone-Borsellino airport is named after two prominent judges slain in the early 1990s for successfully pursing the Cosa Nostra. On ... Read More...