Category: Writing
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Recto Verso
The UK’s Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, has written a poem to commemorate the Duke of Edinburgh’s passing. The Prince famously loathed sycophants, which must have been a hefty burden in itself given his position in the crosshairs of the nation’s most devoted bottom-feeders. Accordingly, the poet compensated for this with wide spadefuls of pretension: Last…
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Chapter and Verse
In the hours following the US Inauguration pomp and ceremony, CNN triumphally announced that Amanda Gorman had ‘… reminded America of what poetry can do’. Well, indirectly at least. Absolutely nothing. We had just watched the world’s most powerful nation saved from the brink of implosion, and once again, aspirations masquerading as values had heralded…
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Not the Point
I have long been aggravated by comma abuse in writing, and that goes for both the scattergunners and the stinges. However, rules are not straightforward, and when you have a flow between linguistic registers sometimes within the same piece, commas are infinitely tricky and controversial. Even that last sentence was, for several reasons. That one,…
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Squirm Ban Führer
Another day, another assault on the freedom of speech by right-on, winkle-dicked, Big Tech bottom-feeders. This time, social media Sturmbannführers at You Tube have driven a metaphorical Panzer through the frontier of my channel and spiked one of my cringeworthy promotional videos. Last month, I received a missive from Team YT to inform me that…
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Cheato Jesus
In a week when Cheeto Jesus offered the first hint that he might give up the spectre of his presidency, Cheato Jesus in Argentina gave up the ghost. There will be much penned about the life and times of Diego Maradona, typically juxtaposing the genius and villain motifs. But the infamous Hand of God was…
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Publisher Be Damned
Earl Spencer has struck again – 23 years after his pulpit skewering of senior royals, he’s pulled the rug out from under serial toad Martin Bashir over some roguish manoeuvring to obtain a sit-and-chat with his sister, the inveterate jizz-whisperer, Princess Diana. Why the jackoff Earl opted to bash Bashir now has not yet budged…
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Give Us a Break
‘I’m taking a break from Twitter‘, say an increasingly hefty swathe of Tweeters. Typically, this is coupled with a reference to the essential preservation of mental health. This must be an affliction of the new millennium. Even an exercise in withdrawing from the social scene ostensibly to avoid the spotlight morphs into a supplementary attention-seeking…
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Fiefdom of Speech
The Twitter police have been sharpening their pitchforks and have disabled a number of high-profile accounts, most notably those of Katie Hopkins and the writer Graham Linehan. Others who stand firmly outside the liberal thought-orthodoxy circle of trust are next up for a jolly good forking. Inevitably, this has raised a furore about attacks on…
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Tweet to Woe
Out in the wide, beloved cybersphere, there seems to be just a slither of controversy about celebrities buying in fake social media followers. Ooh, the abject shame of it. It’s ruffled a few feather boas, I can tell you, and several fame hoggers have been on the receiving end of allegations that they’ve bought millions…
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Farce of Nature
Within the next week, Boris will be promulgating his grand design to wean us off off his lockdown boob. I only wish that he’d put the same level of contemplation into the decision that made suckers of us all. And that those who are getting so bent out of shape right now had exercised their…
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