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Friday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The hypocrisy of the fame-shy famous

Three years ago, I started employing actors, when I had my first play in the Brighton Fringe. I always think they slightly disapprove of me as I’m a fidget and tend to leave rehearsals early (as I remarked to my husband and co-writer of the latest one as we hightailed it off to the pub one day after only an hour of watching our cast run lines: ‘We didn’t ask them to sit in the room and watch us write the ruddy thing, did we?’) but I love to observe them. In fact, I find it almost too affecting an experience, which could explain my reluctance to watch them too

Zoe Strimpel

The descent of the Cambridge ball

I went to quite a few May balls in my three years as an undergraduate at Cambridge. As an editor at the student newspaper I blagged my way into the top ones – Magdalene, Trinity and John’s – since they were stupidly expensive and even as a 20-year-old student I had the sense to feel it should be many years before anything to do with enjoyment was worth more than £20, let alone £100-plus. The university now packages its student experience, from the academic to the social, in the neurotic, righteous language of ‘safety’ and ‘inclusion’ The price certainly ensured a very high degree of pretentiousness – even by Cambridge

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The greatest rockstar you’ve never heard of

A man takes the stage at the Clapham Grand. His large, histrionic eyes are ringed with kohl. His slim limbs are decked in spandex, open to a furry navel. He throws back his flaxen hair and punches the air. ‘Thunder!’ he yells to the opening salvo of the AC/DC tub-thumper ‘Thunderstruck’. His name is Mac Savage and I used to know him at school.  The set that follows is a greatest hits of the 1980s and 1990s, from Bono to Britney. And there are revelations. Did you ever notice, for instance, how tender the lyrics are to Tina Turner’s ‘The Best’? Or how terrible they are to ‘The Final Countdown’?  And Mac

Wednesday

Robin Ashenden

My battle with a Puglian pugilist

To nearly any English tourist, the small southern Italian town I’m currently living in, half an hour from my daughter’s school, would seem idyllic. It has an old castle, a monastery and olive groves in all directions, but in Puglian guidebooks it barely rates a mention. It’s the scruffy, down-to-earth cousin of richer or bigger towns nearby, places like Monopoli or Bari, but has nearly everything I could want. There are arches and stone stairways, pot-plants everywhere (80 in my alleyway alone), and that delicious, ivory-coloured stone which paves the streets in Puglia and which long use has polished to a shine. At night the street-lanterns turn the white buildings

Alec Marsh

Penknives aren’t dangerous

The company that makes the world-renowned Swiss Army penknife has decided to introduce a range of penknives that come… wait for it… without knives – citing increased regulations ‘due to the violence in the world’. It isn’t the knives that need changing, but rather the poorly-applied laws The problem is that a Swiss Army penknife without a knife isn’t a penknife, it’s a multi-tool, which is an entirely different kettle of fish (and you couldn’t possibly gut a fish with one of them – unless you’re going to unleash the corkscrew, Phillips screwdriver or tweezers on your trout). It isn’t the knives that need changing, but rather the poorly-applied laws. In Britain, for

Michael Duggan

The lost art of the football punch-up

Fifty-five years ago, in a match at Highbury Stadium, the Leeds United goalkeeper Gary Sprake punched Arsenal midfielder Bobby Gould hard in the face. Gould had jumped to try and meet a cross with his head. As he was returning to earth in a kind of pirouette, he swung his right heel back in the direction of Sprake, jabbing his studs into his opponent’s ribcage. Crafty. Nasty. Sprake then took his revenge, laying out Gould with a left hook. In these incidents, some kind of masculine code of honour kicked in What happened next is a 90 second lesson in older forms of masculinity and an older form of football. As

Tuesday

Mary Dejevsky

The concerning sickness of NHS staff

If you have been to the cinema recently and arrived in time for the adverts, you may already know what I am talking about. Somewhere between promotions for mega-burgers in glorious technicolour and exotic holiday destinations, you are plunged into what seems an endless, but is actually only a two-minute, horror flick, entitled ‘Sicker than the patients’.  The fitness of at least half  the nursing and support staff I encountered left a lot to be desired It is two minutes of unrelieved gloom and despair, book-ended by a family rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ around a sick patient (Daddy), who – lucky guy – appears to have a room to himself, not just

Julie Bindel

The food trends that need to die

Jacques – a tiny French restaurant in Finsbury Park – was the very first posh joint I ever ate at, back in 1987, and I have fond memories of it. The proprietor, Jacques, was a flamboyant 40-something: very gay, extremely rude to his customers (did I mention he was from Paris?) and partial to drinking his own profits. Nouvelle Cuisine, with far less fat and much smaller portions, was on trend, and Jacques’s glorious menu of rabbit in mustard sauce with mashed potatoes, and rich crème brûlée, was slowly replaced by carrot salad, followed by minuscule portions of blowtorched fruit. The cheaper ingredients and smaller portions allowed Jacque to consume