Cherries On Top

It starts simply enough. He stops going to diet club. His food diaries and menu guides sit on the kitchen windowsill, gathering dust and dead aphids.  Jars of honey mysteriously empty overnight. When I go away for an evening, I come back and find an empty takeaway pizza box stuffed in the bin. His tummy begins to […]

Seriously: why are the American newspaper supplements coming out with all these terrific cover stories, when our UK equivalents are still stuffed with Sex And The City: The Movie bilge? Shouldn’t it be the other way round?
Anyway, I wanted to link to T M Shine’s cover story in the Washington Post’s Sunday magazine. Terminated is […]

When Eastenders turned rubbish (some years ago now - around the time when Dirty Den came back from the dead), it was the end of a beautiful relationship. Now I’m addicted to the episode round-ups on the BBC website. It’s the potent combination of the photo story format and the show’s sweetly improbable storylines - as if My Guy and […]

 Over at Notes from the Slush Pile, Candy Gourlay has printed a selection of ill-judged turns of phrase, collected from hapless students.
Every year, English teachers from across the country can submit their collections of actual similes and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across […]

Writing in the Guardian today, media commentator Peter Wilby takes the Daily Mail to task for its relentless scrutiny of - and carping about -women’s bodies.
The tone - of censoriousness mixed with contrived sympathy - is quintessentially Mail. The paper is like a hyper-critical, over-protective parent. Very little escapes its eagle eye. The lips of the […]

 
I’m not sure if many people in the UK (bloggers excepted) have heard of Emily Gould, but she used to be an editor at gawker.com: a New York-based blog that skewers that city’s quasi-famous luminaries with lashings of delicious snark. She has attracted lashings and lashings of snark for herself, ever since another of her blogs, […]

I’ve been in London this week. When I moved away from the city, more than a year ago, I thought I would be popping back down regularly. That hasn’t happened - and in all honesty, every time I do go back, I’m pleased to have left. We used to live in a perennially “up and […]

Ha! Looks like I’m not the only one who has had enough of the SATC juggernaut…

Time Out New York

The Daily Telegraph has some sort of wedding special today, by the look of their website. There’s an interesting guide to etiquette - I still recall, with horror, the insurmountable challenges faced when trying to get our own would-be wedding guests to RSVP - but predictably, a lot of it is shopping-centred, and populated by luxury […]

Come on.
Even if you called BS on A Million Little Pieces long before the press did, you can’t help but feel just a little bit sorry for the guy after a review that begins,
“Bright Shiny Morning” is a terrible book. One of the worst I’ve ever read.  
Mind you, he did receive an alleged $1,500,000 for his trouble. 
LA […]