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A friend bought me one of these for Christmas. It's a Nigella Lawson. A sticker on the bottom said:
"We have enough to do in life without adding to the washing up so a dish that you cook in and serve in has to make sense. But actually, the best case for my oven to tableware is that it is beautiful in a relaxed and homey way: and so fantabulously non-stick it’s almost spooky!"
Oh dear. Puts a chap right off his food.
The crunch bites in historic Bath.
Most years I see the first flowers of spring in a graveyard in Deepest Hackney. Beat that. This year, though, I spied crocuses on a roadside verge in Wells before spotting any elsewhere. That was yesterday morning. Yesterday evening, two hours before midnight, I happened to be walking through that Hackney graveyard, looking for Home Secretaries to frighten. I didn't see any, or any spring flowers. But I've just found some in another location on my home patch. Crocuses, that is.
Historian Tristram Hunt:
"The Prime Minister has returned home to face the usual crop of crises - from Northern Rock and the European Union treaty to MPs' pay and various incompetencies from Peter Hain. But amidst the fading state choreography of this month's whistle-stop Asia trip, there could be found new insights into Brown the statesman and, more importantly, his "vision" of Britain. For the kind of political mission statement he has had such difficulty laying out for UK electors here could be discerned far more easily abroad. As he sold Britain, we found his image of the country - and it proved intriguingly at odds with his traditional social-democratic concerns."
He continues:
"But what makes Brown's time in China and India notably different from Merkel's, Sarkozy's and that of other Euro leaders hawking their wares is that Britain was also selling itself as a place, rather than power. And when it comes to this global image, the Prime Minister similarly returned us to a Mansion House version of Britain as a trading nation dominated by the City, the docks and a broadband, coffee-house culture. Gordon Brown, biographer of James Maxton and the Red Clydeside docks, has embraced a Brand Britain strangely devoid of industrial heritage, political inheritance, or socialist virtue."
Now read on.
My latest for The Guardian:
"After much trailing and leaking, Martin Bright's investigation of the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, went out on Channel 4 last night in defiance of its subject's futile demand that it be shelved on grounds of partiality. 'The Court Of Ken' was the latest in a long line of attacks on Livingstone and his regime, most of them launched by the Evening Standard, whose reporting of the 2008 mayoral campaign so far has, predictably, been so skewed it almost defies parody.The Dispatches programme had more going for it than that, as I'd hoped. I've no reason to doubt that Martin - New Statesman's political editor and one of my Facebook friends - is still the good guy and diligent journalist he was when he worked for the Guardian. Yet parts of it displayed the same faults daily exemplified by the capital's one-eyed tabloid: much digging for not much gold and an undue interest in personalities at the expense of perspective and even-handed coverage of the issues Londoners and others need to better understand before the election on May 1
.
Hey! Guess what!
"The Victorian notion of marriage as the 'socially accepted and religiously sanctified means of having sex' has vanished, says the [latest British Social Attitudes] study: 70% of people think there is nothing wrong with sex before marriage, compared with fewer than half (48%) in 1984. Cohabitation and marriage have become effective equivalents in the minds of most: two-thirds of people believe there is little difference between being married and living together, and only just over one in four (28%) think married couples make better parents than unmarried ones...three in 10 people think it should be harder for couples with children under 16 to get divorced, though four in 10 disagree. Four in 10 people believe one parent can bring up a child as well as two, and a similar proportion think two are better than one. Nevertheless, support for divorce is strong: almost two-thirds think it can be a positive step towards a new life, and over three-quarters think it is not divorce that harms children but conflict between their parents."
And another thing...
"The past two decades have seen a revolution in attitudes towards gay and lesbian partnerships, the survey shows. Fewer than one in five now believe homosexual relationships are always wrong, while half regard them as rarely or never wrong."
And another...
"Gordon Brown's choice of Britishness as one of the defining themes of his government may be out of tune with the popular mood, the report suggests. It found that people in England are substantially less likely to define themselves as British and more likely to assert an English identity than 15 years ago. In Scotland, the proportion of people claiming to be British rather than Scottish is now only 14%. The study found that "only" or "mainly" British has fallen to 13% in England and 3% in Scotland."
If real, living British people have rejected the Victorian model of marriage, family and sexual morality, why is David Cameron in favour of it? And if fewer and fewer real, living British people identify themselves principally as British, why does Gordon Brown keep banging on about it? Makes you wonder, doesn't it? More here.
Someone I know who knows says everyone should have one of these. Know what I mean?
The rich are getting richer, the north is getting poorer.
"The chief executive of Marks & Spencer believes the UK is fast becoming a very divided nation: the rich who live inside the M25 - and the rest. Speaking earlier this month, Sir Stuart Rose said there was a widening gulf between the have-nots and the have-a-lots, which is now wider than he had seen in 35 years behind the counter of stores such as M&S, Burton and Dorothy Perkins. "I have never seen such a polarised UK economy," he said. "The rich are so very, very rich. The West End can't get enough diamonds. But the poor are getting poorer. Outside London it is a completely different economy."
Surprised? Let me guess. Now read on.
My piece for The Guardian yesterday:
Crime is the politician's most flexible friend - or foe. No issue is more conducive to the stirring of mob feeling, to the converting of bleak emotions into votes. No statistics are more amenable to distortion by scuffling office-seekers as those compiled on villainy. With law and order topping Londoners' list of anxieties, a repertoire of evasions and misrepresentations has already been deployed in the dust-up over who'll be the capital's mayor. Leading candidates have been up to no good. Should you buy a crime policy from any of them?
Continue reading "Crime In London: What The Candidates Claim" »
I watched the last 20 minutes of Newcastle versus Bolton on Saturday evening, mostly out of the corner my eye. The Magpies pressed ineffectually, their opponents blocked obdurately. At intervals Setanta's cameras picked out placards in the crowd heralding the return of "King Kev". The consensus is that Keegan's reappointment is a triumph of romance over realism. I think that's right, and it makes me smile and despair at the same time. Keegan's football philosophy has always exemplified a school of English patriotism that pre-dates even his playing days. It's all about good mates together having more heart and more flair than the other lot. It served him wonderfully as a player, but has worked less for him as a manager. When he was England boss he sometimes implied that our best bet was to stick some cold steel up Johnny Foreigner. Cheery, honest and doomed, he'd have been a good man in the trenches. He'd have been a disaster too. Football is a metaphor for hopeless optimism.
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