Sept 9th – A man and a woman had a little baby. Yes, they did. They had three in the family, that’s a magic number.

As is the way for the put upon, bullied and despised, rather than fight back, you come to accept accusations and implied assertions of dishonesty, as the right of the interrogator who has identified a weakness in a legitimate target.

Life in plastic, it’s (not) fantastic.

a boring cliché of a film that didn’t so much pluck the low hanging fruit to make its observations about empowerment, enablement, and male entitlement, as much as pick the rotting fruit up from the ground.

27th July – waiting for the summer rain.

It was bad enough standing on the dockside waving away my contemporaries as the ship called fulfilment raised its anchor and chugged away towards the horizon, it’s quite another to be left standing on the runway as Elon Musk’s last batch of new pioneers leaves the abandoned earth to plunder another planet.

20th July – Everyone says how do you do, down on Jollity Farm.

Alpha males, and passive aggressive silence.

A pair of serves has made the game go Tsits

That’s why people like Tsitsipas, who still hangs around with his fishwife mum, and gets his girlfriends from agencies, is so bad for the game.

Jul 3rd – Scandi-noir and Brexi-gris.

Our commissioning editors are the sort of people who could not be trusted to judge an IQ contest between Joey Essex and Bobby Seagull.

Jun 28th – So many things I would have done, but clouds got in the way.

Putin needs Trump as badly as Trump needs Putin.

Jun 18th – out of date messages, and up to date posts.

Some of you subscribe to these messages - if you do, I am very grateful. Thank you. And, should you, each time there is a new post, you'll receive an email like the one below. There is only one trouble with that. The email contains the text of the (initial) post, and so, the temptation … Continue reading Jun 18th – out of date messages, and up to date posts.

June 17th – Nobody loves you when you’re down and out.

Not very long ago, in a manuscript for a novel, I wrote (of scientists, but meant by it boors stinking of self-rectitude) Wait ’til they realise that there wasn’t a Big Bang, and that our particular part of the cosmos looks like it’s expanding outwards, while the real explanation is that everything around it is going in the other direction. Like cancer on an ageing corpse. They won’t say sorry, though, – they’ll just say, “We’re even cleverer now.”

June 9th – Multiplicating, that’s the name of the game.

Consider this for a rule change: there has to be clear air between the attacker and the defender.