The Edinburgh Fringe is noisy. No, not the plaintiff wheezy whine of the devil’s bellows. I’m overwhelmed by the nauseous pollution; the brash posters littering the streets. Gaudy graphics constructed to hypnotise one’s peripheral vision. Loud marketing. Dumb ubiquity. Hopeless strategy to attract an audience. On the last count, walking a 400 yard stretch (imperial…
On April 7th, 1994, late at night, in a long-since rebranded Glaswegian hotel, a tape was recorded of two brothers that would launch the beginning one of the longest running and most entertaining rock n roll feuds of all time. The Wibbling Rivalry tapes, a drunken argument between the crown princes of rock n roll…
It took half a century for us to work out that smoking had certain negative qualities, and it took another twenty years for the legislators to do something about it. Big Tobacco was a formidable opponent to change for several reasons. Yes, it was massively lucrative, provided thousands of jobs and sold an aspirational product…
One of the minor, but depressing, changes to our society is that since Brexit, and the cultural and media zeitgeist got sucked into a political chaos-loop there is no part of national celebration that the zealots and partisans can’t ram their agenda through. Last week Dawn Foster, outrider for Jeremy Corbyn, criticised ‘centrists’ for basing…