The year got started with King Leopold’s Ghost,
About the Belgian monarch who decreed
He owned the Congo. I got so engrossed
In tracking his abominable greed,
And its effects on those who suffered most
That by the end I felt no evil deed
That fiction could invent would further darken
The heart that strolled through palace grounds in Laeken.
Convenience Store Woman, picked up next,
Was ghostly in itself. Narrated by
A character perpetually perplexed
By human interactions, it’s a wry
Outsider’s take on humans: oversexed
And difficult to please. It made me try,
Despite my reservations, to commence a
Liaison with my local Marks & Spencer.
Read MoreTHE AFFAIR OF THE APRICOT MILLEFEUILLE or THE INFERNAL INFINITESIMAL, An exploit of the mathematicians Legendre and Fourier, as extracted from the reminiscences of Charles Fourier, Eminent mathematician and world-respected authority in matters of numerical analysis and shortcrust pastry. Paris MDCCCXXXVI
Read MoreShin-deep in surf suds, we looked out to sea,
Beyond the breakers, in the seeming calm,
Where gliding through the waves, effortlessly,
We saw the graceful shimmer of your arm.
Read MoreI would like to say PG Wodehouse saved my life. That’s what Hugh Laurie said, in an article in The Daily Telegraph, and if I had to go through life exclusively repeating the published words of Hugh Laurie, I think I might die a happy man.
But as it happens PG Wodehouse didn’t save my life. He gave me instead a tolerable adolescence. That doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it, as saying he saved my life. You can’t imagine Hugh Laurie saying PG Wodehouse gave him a tolerable adolescence in an article in The Daily Telegraph. Who’d want to read that!
Read MoreWhen the Greek hero Theseus returned to Athens after turning the Minotaur into half a tonne of fillet steak that tasted oddly of chicken, the ship he sailed in became something of a national monument. Planks grown salt-water fat were instantly stripped out and replaced, ragged sails were patched, and any empty bottles of Ouzo in the executive cabin minibars were silently refilled. Within a few years, the cosmetic surgery had grown so extensive that a popular theme in the letters pages of Athenian philosophy periodicals was to question whether it was still the same ship of Theseus. (Well played, Perplexed of Ephesus, well played).
Read MoreMy mother likes to tell a story about my first diagnosed pathology of the competitive spirit. I must have been no more than 10, and playing in a regular chess league whose influence upon my present-day ability manifests itself only in my tendency to lose to anyone over the age of 11.
Read MoreThis week, I put a volleyball into orbit.
It wasn’t even that hard. All I needed was for our team to be in the semi-finals of our weekly league, for us to go match point down with one final opportunity to stay in the game, and then – and this bit was crucial – for it to be my turn to serve.
Read MoreWhen I was a child I discovered that there was a cheese that shared my name. It was described in our well-thumbed edition of the Encyclopaedia of Cheese as fatty and full-bodied, which felt less like an informed tasting note and more like a hint.
Read MoreLet’s raise a glass to Robbie Burns,
Whose dialect, one soon discerns,
Can give the palate friction burns.
Don’t try the accent!
Or swallow, as the schoolchild learns,
Muscle relaxant.
Read MoreMatt, both of us are happily in Spain,
A proper summer break long overdue.
For days now heavy clouds have presaged rain
But their appearance doesn’t spoil the view:
The hills that seemed so dinky from the plane
Now loom above the mist like giants. You
Will hopefully accept with an apology
This sloppy foray into climatology.
Read MoreBorn 0-500AD: The generation everyone is glad to see the back of: the baobaby boomers. Took advantage of a thriving ecology to lay down roots in some of the desert’s most desirable neighbourhoods. Strong and majestic, in possession of the wisdom of the ages while somehow absolutely incapable of handling upgrades to the printer software.
Read MoreCutilitarianism
All living things are created equal, unless I’ve seen it in my picture book or it makes a funny noise in which case it’s better especially if it’s a rabbit or a giraffe and even more so if it’s got wheels.
Read MoreSKELETONS from an early 21st century community have revealed physical abnormalities that could shed light on this darkest age of human history.
“You can tell a lot about a person by their skeleton,” said Martha Woundbinder, who led the study, “such as whether or not they’re dead.”
Read MoreDO YOU feel exhausted by the pace of city life? Ever hate yourself and the fish you’re turning into? Good. You’re almost certainly living life all wrong, and it’s time to panic over all the things you should be doing instead.
Here’s a handy list of ways you can live a better, stress-free life. Hurry up and read it now before you make things even worse for yourself, you molly.
Read MoreMay 2018 – Dentists are revealed to have the ability to smell fear. The research is soon forgotten by the general public but state security services take note.
November 2019 – A trial programme is implemented at JFK airport to replace sniffer dogs with teams of dentists trained to detect hard drugs and explosives. It is declared a failure when two passengers sue the airport for non-consensual root canal work, but the damage is done.
Read MoreTeam,
Thank you all for making such an effort at the humans’ two-hundred-thousand-year-long housewarming party. I think we can all agree the planet is now definitely warmer! It’s always tough being the new species on the block and I’m glad to see we gave them the traditional Earth welcome of malaria, sepsis and bodies inefficiently evolved for life on land.
Read MoreSCIENTISTS interpreting the latest signals from Pluto have come closer to revealing its true identity.
“For a long time we thought it was a planet,” said Una Científica. “Then we reclassified it as a dwarf planet. Then we listened closer and discovered it was actually a virulent misogynist and vocal member of the alt-right.”
Read MoreAnd the Lord said unto Noah I shall bring about a great flood. And Noah said Hold on, is this God? And the Lord confirmed that it was He.
God? said Noah. Let me tell you, you’re doing a terrific job. Just terrific. I think you’re someone who’s being recognised more and more all the time, and I have to say, we’ve made you pretty famous down here, almost as famous as me.
Read MoreMy girlfriend is a geotechnical engineer. Which means, in brief, that she tells the ground what to do. This is no easy task. The ground, you see, is used to getting its own way. A bed of limestone that has spent many happy centuries as a bed of limestone would like to carry on being a bed of limestone, and reacts poorly to the suggestion it should embrace its new identity as a multi-storey carpark. Even if its cooperation can be secured, constant vigilance is needed. Because for an entity that is to the uneducated eye predominantly dirt, the ground can be surprisingly prissy. A rude word from a retaining wall, and four lanes of motorway suddenly become navigable only by trowel. A soupçon too much moisture for its liking and Westminster station needs to be bailed out with a bucket. Dig a hole in the wrong place and, well, prepare for the channel ferry to commence boarding at Watford.
Read MoreFor a while in early 2015 I gatecrashed a twitter mini-fiction party taking place under the #smalltales banner. Everybody was kind enough to look the other way as I trod on people’s feet and finished off the last of the cheese twists, which made the whole experience a highlight of the Monday commute. The resultant 100-word concocta had to be hosted somewhere, and that somewhere had to be hyperlinked, and that hyperlink happened to attract your thumbstroke stroke cursorclick, and here we both are.
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