Despite the relief felt at Joe Biden’s inauguration, optimism was light on the ground in the UK in January 2021. A surge in infections in December had cancelled Christmas for many - our own plans to hire a cottage in the Peak District for a few days away from London had been scuppered by a ‘Stay at Home’ order issued under the confusing new ‘tier’ system. Whatever tier we were in, it wasn’t a good one. A new covid variant was on the march, reducing the efficacy of vaccines an

In the weeks and months after my role at an advertising agency had been made redundant back in 2016 I made it a point of principle not to fall into the trap of browsing Netflix (or Amazon Prime) from the moment Manon left the house for work until it was time to collect Coco from school. Of course I did watch things on Netflix and Amazon Prime and BBC iPlayer and YouTube, but not all day long. And I definitely didn't talk about what I was watching, keeping quiet when Whatsapp

I spent a lovely couple of hours at some new digital art exhibitions currently showing in London. First up was The Delusion at Serpentine...

While I’ve been shopping online since 1998 and have placed several thousand orders in the intervening years, less than half a dozen of...

19 May 2020 - Cadac Pizza Stone Compared with many, we were well placed to get through lockdown in some comfort. We had a big house...

Twenty-five years ago I was assistant to a senior publisher at Penguin Books who was responsible, as part of his portfolio, for the Time...

Sweaty Selfie at the top of Parliament Hill - 10 May 2020 I’d started running while working at Penguin Books, occasionally dodging...

By the middle of April we were deep into the first lockdown and I was going a bit mad. Anyone saying that things would soon return to...

Before Covid and lockdown and stay at home orders, I don’t think I’d really appreciated the value of retail therapy or accepted that it...

This post is part of a series about the things I've bought on Amazon since opening my account in September 1998. For more details about...

While the iPAC family of 'Pocket PCs' was clearly marketed at the sort of young urban professional who might be in the market for a...

Sometime during President Trump's first term, people stopped talking about the 'Overton Window', the spectrum of ideas considered...

Late last year I started thinking about things that once were useful and are no longer so. Skin, discarded by a snake This chain of...

Listening to sounds made of books in the London Library Forms of Paper (2024 remaster) I am sitting in the main reading room of the...

This post is part of a series of vignettes about the things I've bought on Amazon since opening my account in September 1998. For more...

For the last few months I've been working on a book idea that has been rattling around in my head for a couple of years or so...