I used to blog.
These are some of my favourite posts.
Bringing Poetry Alive for Key Stage 4
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Job's comforter
I finished with Julian Barnes last month. I don't quite know what to do with myself. It wasn't unexpected, of course; as soon as he came into my life again I knew the end would come. He turns up when he feels like it and knows I'll be waiting, pre-ordered...
This is who we are and this is what we do
So there was this thing, this thing that my English teacher used to make us do when we were thirteen and she grew tired of the vicious noise and thinly stretched boredom in the years before exams or grades just to fill the time we would be made to take...
Sprachgefuhl
Steatopygic. Hadeharia. Misodoctakleidist. Grapholagnia. Basorexia. Petrichor. Apodyopsis. Lygerastia. Krukolibidinous. Colposinquanonia. Vulva. The English language is engorged to the point of arrestable obscenity with hundreds of thousands of words with the most delicious meaning, exquisite construction and whimperingly apposite usefulness that it seems the very height of ingratitude to find oneself...
The 12 News Of The World days of Christmas
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Greek kalends
I first met P at three in the morning on a lowering June night in a twenty four hour Londis near Finsbury Park tube. I was shuffling through the door in search of cheap coffee and Tampax when he rounded a corner at speed and caught me under the arm,...
Amative
The first thing I ever collected in my life was Garbage Pail Kids, aged seven. My foot-long swapsies pile would surely have been my route to instant popularity had it not also been widely known that although my mother was perfectly content to let me gloat over grotesque pictures of...
Boilerplate
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Internecine
The first idol I ever had was Tufty, of the Tufty Club. His cheery yellow trousers and bright-eyed, alert expression are, I am sure, the sole reason I have reached the age of twenty eight without ever having suffered the dreadful fate of Willy Weasel, hit by a car because...
Ebriection
AND NOW THE SUPPING FORECAST ISSUED BY THE MET OFFICE ON BEHALF OF THE MARITIME AND COASTGUARD AGENCY, AT 0505 ON THURSDAY 17 MAY 2007. THE GENERAL SYNOPSIS AT 1300 HIGH SPIRITS 1000 EXPECTED SOUTH OXFORD STREET 1800 BY 1900 TOMORROW. DEVELOPING POSSE EXPECTED 0.5 MILES WEST OF SOHO BY...
Opusculum
Will Self? he asked. Hmmmm.....no, I said. Oh I wanted to, don't get me wrong. There's no way quicker into my heart than a capriciously crafted turn of phrase and certain sentences of his have been known to make three of my internal organs stop working simultaneously. But every time...
Steganography
I can't watch soaps. Aside from any real though undeniably fustian aversion to the genre the most persistent memory of my childhood is hearing the music from Eastenders thumping up through my bedroom floor from the living room below, punctuated by the persistently annoying and unrelentingly aggrieved snarls of my...
Metro
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Inculcate
Misogynists, cod philosophers and Daily Mail staff writers on deadline and desperate for a suitably conventional angle to their story alike are fond of quoting the threadbare axiom that in order to see what your girlfriend will be like in thirty years, look to her mother. Wilde said that the...
A News of the World Christmas
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The Pandemian Guide to Pumpkin Carving
Ten easy steps to demon-repelling success. 1. Stop in at the greengrocer's on your way home from work. Look about you in awe and wonder at this curious shop where people pick up fruit and vegetables like they actually know what they are and what's more, plan to eat them....
Misunderstanding
Tube announcer: Station cleaner to the ticket office please, spinach on concourse. Me: Spinach! Spinach in the tube station! A small forest of swaying vegetation smothering the Oyster machine in dark glossy leaves and a hazy cloud of vitamin C! Rows of crisp, fresh lettuce springing up between cracks in...
Ergophobia
Give praise to the humble list, for they bring order to our lives. Today's list is eight things I want to be when I grow up, and the reasons why I wont be. 1. Classical musician I watch the Proms and oh, the orchestra all look so effortlessly and fabulously...
Phatic
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Destins
The Game of Life was my favourite board game as a child. On Sundays afternoons, after the Smurfs and Shaw Taylor while my father slept off three lunchtime pints of dark, speckled beer, my mother and I would set up the board on the living room floor and spend a...
Proceleusmatic
Two stops from the station the bus has come to a jolting halt in the middle of the road so the driver can argue, furiously and unintelligably, with an unknown voice. I shift in my seat and stare out over the scrubby grass of Finsbury Park. The dust smeared windows...
Weltschmerz
Dear friend, Thank you for the invitation to your wedding that arrived in the post this morning. I haven't seen you since we graduated; it must be a big event. I did not know you were seeing anyone seriously. No-one we ever met on countless bar nights could hold your...
Palimpsest
My old university does not have a library. It has a Learning Resources Centre. A huge, square structure encased in dark blue glass, its guts smelt of new carpet and blond wood and furniture polish, but never of paper. It has a place where you might go to borrow video...
The baffled king composing hallelujah
This morning I woke up thinking about the daily inadequacies in our expressive use of language. I was also wondering why my bedroom smelt faintly of guinea pig, but that doesn't make me sound quite so clever. Specifically, why virginity is always something that is said to have been lost....
The shirt
His scent went too quickly from the pillow, so she now keeps the shirt she removed from his bag before he woke wrapped in clingfilm and buried at the bottom of her wardrobe. Every time she removes it and presses her face into it she is sure she can see...
Votary
When I look back on it, I think it was Tolstoy that led me to eventually abandon my collection of stories about how people fell in love in favour of tales of how they split up. All happy families are happy alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own...
Matter of time
Heading home on the Bakerloo, two stations past Edgware Road. The train stops, half in and half out of the tunnel, and no-one looks up. After a minute or two, the driver tells us he has 'absolutely no idea' why the train is has been stopped, but it has. Five...
Esprit d'escalier
I collect stories about how people fall in love. Not deliberately, and until a short while ago I wasn't aware that I did. but I do. People seem to like to tell me them, perhaps knowing that I wont try and counter with an even more spectacular yarn of fate...
Roman à clef
The first time I ever had French toast, it was made for me by a man in a rubber maid's dress. Expressing his enthusiasm for this cheapest and easiest of suppers and distinct yet polite dismay that I'd never before tasted this classic student delicacy, we scooped up bread and...
Jebote, voilm kasicni venecijanski stil
There was a baby staring at me on the bus this afternoon for the entire hour-long journey. Babies and small children stare at me all the time. I've no idea why, since I don't look particularly unusual most of the time (the turquoise hair is long gone), but for some...
Mind the gap
I've invented a new pastime for myself. A challenge, if you will, to pass the lonely, lonely hours of unemployment between Bargain Hunt and Richard and Judy. The idea occurred to me when I was drying my hair this morning with a London Underground towel I bought one week instead...
Panic on the streets of London
I'm holding my breath. I'm too scared to move. I think there's someone else in my flat. I'm downstairs, on the computer, and I am almost absolutely positively certain I heard footsteps in my bedroom above. Oh God, what to do? a) Rush upstairs and confront them b) Creep upstairs...