Sex is a sport – it’s a game of inches. There. That’s the kind of opening you wanted, wasn’t it? The joke (a good one) doesn’t express any great truth about sex, and yet, all joking aside, there might be something essential about humour that allows us to talk honestly about sex. Talking about it with […]
From trampoline to World War III
Whilst lying on my trampoline one day, I watched a plane drift across an otherwise perfect blue sky. It was a small plane without contrails and, with its long wings curved at the ends, I thought it looked something like a WWII plane. It was only a single mark on a cold sky, but what […]
2016: A series of unfortunate events
The heros of 2016 have been those on the Fleet Street obituary desks whose workload was intense all the way through from The Bad Beginning to The End. The reaper may have come many times during the year, but for myself the truly sorry moment of 2016 was not a moment at all. It was rather the slow […]
How to become an Exeter BNOC
I hate you if, in reading this, you actually harbour the desire to attain the promised status. But I do wish you well in your quest to become a Big-Name-On-Campus, because it sounds like you deserve to be unwittingly wasting your own time. Nobody is going to remember you because you were the once the president of […]
Round-up: Clinton-Trump debate
Trump didn’t fancy having a moderator for the presidential debates. Like him, I would usually be in favour of removing the middle-man. American debates can be over-moderated to such an extent that candidates are prevented from addressing one another. However, as the debate started, it immediately occurred to me that Lester Holt could be as […]
Chilcot changed my mind
Many people are saying that Chilcot has proven Tony Blair to be a war criminal. These people were always going to say this, whatever the report had said, hadn’t said, or even would never have said (the majority of them haven’t read all 2.6 million words). I haven’t read the whole thing either, but one doesn’t […]
Midsummer’s dream turned midsummer’s nightmare?
O ne Midsummer’s day, rambling at the Hay Exeposé learned of the BBC play, “Watch it! It’s marvelous,” he told the crowd, For Russell T. Davies the applause rang out loud. Then I went away, forming this review Whose form now brakes off, to introduce it to you. Oh, and spoilers. Russell T Davies successfully […]
Piers Corbyn part two: the BBC
Picking the mic back up, I wonder how exactly it was that the wind had blown mine and Piers’ conversation away from the subject of the weather to where we had now arrived: the BBC’s attempt to “disparage” and “denounce” the Corbyn brothers. I tentatively ventured an opinion. “See, I watched your interview and I thought […]
Piers Corbyn part one: the big bad climategate
“We were very practical. We were into making things all the time. I made metrological instruments, a canoe, stuff like that… Jeremy was into looking after old cars.” Piers Corbyn grew up with, and is known as, the brother of Jeremy Corbyn, but is himself an intriguing figure of no little controversy thanks to his skeptical […]
An unorthodox endorsement of Hillary Clinton
Bernie Sanders is the educated version of his lesser leftist twin that the UK has been laden with. He is a very impressive man. In the 1960s he was an active campaigner for civil rights and, since then, he has gone on to prove himself across different public positions, from the Mayor of Burlington to a Senator […]