Places
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Heading up the Ouse
Greetings from York, where I am cat sitting Maisie and Poppy, old friends both, near what once was York City’s football ground, Bootham Crescent. (Very cheap looking houses are currently being built on what was once the pitch; I give them twenty years.) I’m not able to do much in the way of exercise at… Read more
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Brighton Marina
If you’re in the mood for some discombobulation, I can recommend Brighton Marina on a drizzly February morning. Built on land reclaimed from the sea, the marina was a 1970s project, turned into a Thatcher’s island kind of retail park in the mid 1980s. It is dominated by a giant Asda and car park, and… Read more
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Brighton Toy and Model Museum
Underneath Brighton station is a treasure trove of forgotten dreams. Brighton Toy and Model Museum, once the Sussex Toy and Model Museum, specialises in “the golden age of British and European toymaking”, and there isn’t much in here beyond the 1970s. Each of these four Victorian cellars is intensely packed with dolls, boats, trains, and… Read more
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Tokyo diary: day one
Tokyo, 2am Saturday 2nd December Hello! I write from a hotel between the Japanese Sword Museum and the National Sumo Arena. I landed at half nine local time, took a while to get through security, took a monorail, and arrives at the hotel just before midnight. On my way, I saw the traditional Friday night… Read more
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REVIEW: A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir, by Ian Buruma
Note – this first appeared in my substack newsletter, which you can subscribe to here You know how it is. It’s the mid-seventies, you’re an upper-middle-class Anglo-Dutch student, and you’re macho-posing in a red jockstrap to Tom Jones’ “It’s Not Unusual” in a seedy theatre behind Kyoto station while a topless dancer writhes around you.… Read more
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Around the Isle of Wight on the Paddle Steamer Waverley
For my Dad’s 70th birthday we went on a jaunt on the last sea-going paddle steamer in the world. The PS Waverley was launched by Glasgow shipbuilders in 1946, replacing her identically named predecessor which was destroyed during the evacuation of Dunkirk. She sailed the Firth of Clyde and Loch Long until 1973, when she… Read more
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Brighton to Southsea by bike
This was an emergency cycle. I had got my ASLEF and RMT strikes mixed up, and thought Friday was the “reduced service” rather than “no trains whatsoever” day [1]. I set off slightly after 4pm, down the hill and around the ruins of the Royal Albion hotel and then out along the seafront through Hove… Read more
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The Foundling Museum, Bloomsbury, London
Fanny Heese. Walter Raleigh. Ethelred Hovell. Martin Scaleshooe. Epaminodas Allen. Bifsell Stanes. Jenny Godmanchester. William Hogarth. Elizabeth Foundling. These are just some of the names of the children who found themselves handed in at London’s Foundling Hospital, a charitable enterprise set up in the 18th century “for the care and maintenance of exposed and deserted… Read more
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Cats, The Bag Of Nails pub, Bristol
There was a bit of a craze for cat cafes in England a few years ago, the concept borrowed from the home of the laser-focused theme restaurant, Japan. The mania seems to have cooled, and here’s hoping all those cats are still being well looked after and are getting a decent number of treats. The… Read more
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Eigg to Oban: a tale of three ferries
I was up on Eigg for Lost Map’s Howlin’ Fling festival – you can read my review of it up on the Morning Star website [1]. This blog post is about what happened after I left, covered in midge bites and having enjoyed all the island’s many tourist activities (amazing music festival, rocky outcrop walk,… Read more
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