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Tied up in knots and choked by choice - Why less is more.
I have just moved house. Notorious for inclusion among the three Ds of devastating stress: Divorce, Death and Decamping. It must be a near universal experience of a house move to be horrified at the...
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The Butcher, the Baker and the Barrister: The way things were they will not be.
In July of this year an exceptionally fine pair of candlesticks called the Cremorne Candelabra sold at Christie’s for just under a million pounds. Manufactured by John Wakelin and William Taylor in...
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Fast Times: Slow Living
Anyone who has kept an eye on Jeremy Corbyn’s first few weeks in office can’t fail to have noticed that he has attracted some criticism and censure. It seems for some that he can do no right with his...
View ArticleGames, Trickery & Getting Off - Sensible & Silly Criticisms
I don’t know if you and your colleagues have ever been accused of being weird, useless and conniving in your professional endeavours. If you have you will know that it can be at once both a wounding...
View ArticleDelicate Flowers & Reasons to Live: Why IS will not be defeated by bomb &...
When charismatic churches are on the look out for new recruits they energetically love bomb them into submission. This practice involves the congregation enhancing the newcomer’s sense of self-worth...
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Wonder + Existence = Life
When was the last time that you truly marvelled at something? Have that in mind while I tell you something about the beautiful Mömpelgarder Altar that can be found in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in...
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Merry Christmas, Joyeux Noël, Buon Natale, Frohe Weihnachten - It's all the...
Last year I spent Christmas in Berlin with my German wife at her mother’s together with my English mother, Italian step-father and French brother-in-law. At one point during dinner all four languages...
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Amicus & Mark Rylance - Friends to the Friendless
The Economist recently published an article predicting the coming abolition of the death penalty in America and elucidating the factors pointing to this, by many, much looked for development. Reading...
View ArticleThe Women's Equality Party: What's in it for me?
On 14thJanuary I went to a 5x15 event at Methodist Central Hall presented by the Women's Equality Party. It was the first major event since WEP’s launch in October 2015. Speaking at the event were...
View ArticleJustice & Forgiveness - The Prosecutors is essential viewing
Art like beauty is in the eye of the beholder but for me the best test of the quality of art is its nearness to truth. By that analysis television is a vexed art form because truth is often difficult,...
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Talking 'bout a Velorution
When one’s job so often considers imprisonment, thinking about it, pleading about it if not, thankfully, experiencing it then it is perhaps no surprise that thoughts turn sometimes to freedom. I don’t...
View ArticleJust dotty about totty
Here’s a test. Are you a dad? Do you have a daughter? Do you have a pet name for your daughter? Is that name Totty? I thought not. What about other fathers’ daughters?There are, of course, other...
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The EU in the Dock - Are you sure?
Put emotion to one side. Decide this case not on sympathy or antipathy but on the evidence. If there are any directions more honoured in the breach than observance than these I would like to know what...
View ArticleBrock Turner: There are words & they are these
There are so many remarkable things about the victim’s statement in the Brock Turner case it is hard to know where to start.One clear starting point is to read it. Read all of it. Right to the end....
View ArticleBritain: Not so Great now
Incorporating adjectives into your country’s name is, if you stop and pause, a very strange thing to do. Yet nobody in Britain I have met has ever been troubled or bemused by the prefixing of the word...
View ArticleBrexit: Losing My Religion
You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time. To which well-worn maxim must be added a...
View ArticleThe war I did not fight
‘How is he?’, ‘I’m sorry?’, ‘How is he?’, ‘How’s who, Sergeant-Major?’, ‘Lord Lucan, last seen in your hair, get a haircut!’ A typical moment of NCO humour means I will never forget the first day of...
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Same same but different: Stop the bother about the other
Another day another miserable story about Muslims being treated disgracefully by an airline for the simple fact of being Muslim. Sadly these stories seem to be proliferating, somebody reading Arabic...
View ArticleDepressing regressing at Justice
When Michael Gove was unexpectedly appointed Lord Chancellor I am chastened to admit I was among some lawyers who instinctively deprecated the development. It was Francis Fitzgibbon QC, the new and...
View ArticleHanging Cheds & The Court of Public Opinion
The court of public opinion has no fixtures, it doesn’t even have warned lists, instead its sittings are unannounced, unexpected and often unnecessary. It is also an unusual court because its jury is...
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