Claire Jackson is a regular contributor to BBC Music magazine and Country Life
John Lewis’s new ‘heirloom splendour’ Christmas range features baubles that mimic a miniature vacuum cleaner, sewing machine, TV – permitted its status in the collection by dint of its bulbous antenna – and a morose-looking pink dog presumably modelled on a Staffordshire figurine. If one were to decorate an entire tree in these monstrosities, it
Beside me, children sing the ‘Hokey Cokey’. I subconsciously put my left foot in – and out – under the desk, where I face an empty page. Willing concentration to return, I turn to a tried and tested method: staring out of the window. The small garden is a stage for white butterflies that flutter
During the early noughties, I pierced hundreds of ears at Claire’s Accessories, the chain store that collapsed into administration last month in the UK. These piercings rarely went smoothly and the evidence often resurfaced: a wonky earring here, a scar there. Good riddance (unemployment notwithstanding), then, to this lavender blight on teen culture. After a
