Acting is all about honesty, if you can fake that you can fake anything.
Even people who don’t listen to BBC Radio 4 know about ‘Desert Island Discs’. Eleven o’clock of a Sunday. After the ‘Archers’ and before something else. Every Sunday at 11.45 I get a phone call from a woman living in Goudhurst, then I get a call from a woman living in Medway. We pick apart … Read more
Who can forget their first ever saucer with a piece of paper sprinkled over with mustard and cress seeds? The excitement as the little green shoots emerged, then the sheer pleasure of eating those newly sprouted leaves with a cut up hardboiled egg on a mound of cold butter that tore holes in a slice … Read more
Bacon laced with nitrates Chicken doused with bleach Using them for pigs and fowls Will fuck up all our healthy bowels It’s time to Act not preach. **** A trade deal with the US Negotiating evil Of chemically processed food That won’t do us an ounce of good Is sleeping with the Devil. **** Those … Read more
As the snow covers the Hellebores I’ve just read that James Dean would have been 90 this week, he died when I was six. Neither Mr. Dean nor Mr. Presley were visitors in our house, our house – one of the first to have quadraphonic sound – preferred to fill the air waves with Mr. … Read more
Way before Woolworths was founded a geezer out in India – Sage Patanjali – was credited with inventing Yoga. Trying to silence the mind and tie the body into self realised knots was the Sages’ gift to the world. Yoga, India’s greatest export apart from Patak’s Brinjal Pickle and Petroleum, is a discipline that is … Read more
It’s so quiet I can hear the ticking clock in the kitchen and Dennis’ snoring in the sitting room. The stove is lit, earlier than normal, cos it’s a frozen-to-the-marrow-kinda-day, well it is the coldest January for ten years. I’ve made a fancy coleslaw using one of those white plastic mandolines that if you’re not … Read more
We didn’t have snow, but it was cold out there, everybody wrapped up and walking in the sunshine. It got me thinking about families, and that there’s something to be said for absentee parenting. My mother was integral to my life; cooking, ironing, even writing an essay for me, that I snuck up my sleeve, … Read more
Improbable behaviour + Imperfect leadership = Imminent Impeachment. As Nobby-No-Mates, stalks the corridors of diminished power, the lacklustre Buffoon attacks his allies with petulant jibes, his auto-cued speeches delivered through a pancaked mouth, his conversational tics lulling us into a false sense of reality. Like a wet newspaper, its’ pages flapping and slapping in a … Read more
He was the handsomest boy at school, he was also the cleverest. Studying in the school library our eyes met over my broken bag of ‘Treets’, ‘milk chocolate covered peanuts with an outer shell of dark brown glazed candy,’ The sweet nuts scattered and bounced ricocheting round the parquet floor like machine gun fire. We … Read more
I know it’s early but we’ve just taken The Tree down. Oh! No! I hear you exclaim. It had to go. The dawter found it on the side of the road just before Christmas. A lovely tall tree with lots of needles that smelt divine. We have a fake tree that we’ve used for over … Read more