On another day in another place.

The gray sky hangs low, pressing you into the ground, opening out the horizon and forcing everything else to admit its insignificance.
Yet on this unpreposing canvas the reds and yellows of the trees glow. Green grass seems brighter. Buildings are whiter, and every little scrap of litter on the ground shines out in lurid [...]

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On Eurovision 2009.

About halfway through the results marathon for the Eurovision contest, Graham Norton, the UK’s new host for the event after Terry Wogan flounced off the show in disgust at the way that in 2008 the UK had come bottom again whilst the Eastern Europeans (and Finland) were having a run of good luck, mistily declared [...]

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On tall tales.

In truth, you don’t have much true creativity.
But you are a good adapter of other people’s ideas.
So your daydreams tend to be a bit dull unless something odd happens.
Odd things don’t generally feature in your life.
Sometimes they happen to other people though.
And once they happened to you:

There you are, ambling down this pleasant street, when [...]

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On the Royal Academy.

You are finding that certain things strike you in an entirely, and usually unanticipated light, now you have a child in tow.
Take the early darkening evenings, for example. You used to quite enjoy this. Coming home in the dark, twinkly lights, a chill in the air. It all gave you an excuse to eat hearty [...]

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On щи.

Today you spent fifteen whole minutes letting the Star push the door shut and then grasp the door handle to pull it open again.
Now there’s a game that doesn’t seem to get old.
Neither does Babushka playing with the light switch for his enjoyment. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. On. Off. [...]

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On Bara Brith.

Sometime after you Grandma died, you took it into your head to make Bara Brith.
Now your Grandma wasn’t Welsh.
She didn’t even live in Wales.
She lived, in fact, about 100 metres from the Welsh border.
But her Bara Brith wasn’t an heirloom recipe or anything. She only moved into the borderlands about 25 years before she died.
It was [...]

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On Remembrance Day

You now no longer have any grandparents.
You miss them.
You were interested to discover yesterday that your new packet of paracetamol came encrusted with Braille, but it reminded you that you will now not be able to ask Grandma whether she finds the little bits of Braille on the buttons you press on the buses to tell the [...]

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On Guy Fawkes Night

The fact that the 5th November went completely unmarked in Russia was always extremely disconcerting to you.
It’s always been a holiday you have celebratedwith vigour, and a trip to the local fireworks display, followed by baked potatoes and your Dad setting up a tray of sand at the far extreme of the garden so that [...]

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On the gasman not comething.

Your life is beginning to resemble art.
It was bad enough that your heating and hot water were cut off for over a week recently, but the situation has descended from the sublimely irritating to the completely ridiculous when you got back from having the Star jabbed to find that the gasman had cometh in your absence to [...]

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On чистота – чистоТайд.

Being without the Internet for twenty odd days as a result of the move to the new flat was bad, but being without a washing machine was far far worse.
This is because the washing machine is the single most useful invention ever.
It’s taken a while for you to realise this, of course.
When you were at [...]

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