The Plashing Vole

I'm feeling optimistic about the world today, which is not normally how people feel after spending the morning in the company of King Le...

You may recall that I complained to the BBC about Newsnight  guests not declaring their oil exploration interests while discussing climate s...

Like many of us, I'm a hypocrite, especially when it comes to Fair Trade. I'm a hypocrite because I buy Fair Trade products without ...

How can you excuse the man who buys bookcases of expensive wood, and piling into them the works of unknown, worthless authors, goes yawning...

More pictures of our trip to Hilbre Island in the Dee estuary. Full set here , or see the previous post for another few favourites. Click t...

We went walking off the Wirral this Saturday. It's the peninsula which juts out between Liverpool and North Wales - an odd, interesting ...

Sometimes, you just need to switch off completely. The other night, the perfect evening consisted of a bottle of home-brewed beer by my frie...

Glorious evening yesterday. We invited Niall Griffiths and Horatio Clare to read and discuss their Mabinogion  retellings. Horatio Clare...

Hello everyone. In my new spirit of achieving a degree of mental and emotional balance, I'm not needling lying Tory scum today. I've...

I was very heartened by the Conservative Party's various policing and justice ministers yesterday. They're promising a new era of z...

Note for new readers: a summary of my dealings with the ASA and Shapps can be found here . A final note with regard to Grant Shapps. Despi...

A belated birthday gift has arrived from one of my wittiest and loveliest colleagues. She has, in her wisdom, given me a pair of voluminous ...

Ploughing up and down the pool today, I tried to distract myself from the sheer misery. After musing on the decadence of a society which req...

Morning everybody. My new determination to greet the world with a sunny disposition had lasted an evening's Newsnight  and the 250 yard ...

After taking a seminar in which one lad matter-of-factly stated that press campaigns against Jews should be allowed because 'Jews run th...

George Osborne's big idea to save the economy: Share for Rights: the chancellor unveiled a £100m "employee-owner" scheme tha...

With a single bound, Grant Shapps is (relatively) free: Further to my letter of 27 September, we have received a response from HowToCor...

Thanks to a combination of electronic media and time on my hands, I've become a serial letter-writer and complainer. It's a terrible...

I may have mentioned in passing that my complaint about HowToCorp's shady business practices (pseudonymic business gurus, testimonials ...

I was out of the office for a whole 11 hours overnight, but what an 11 hours they've been. If you buy The Independent (no, seriously),...