We’re midway into my ten ways to break the ice with strangers when you’re travelling – and now it’s time to play the fool.
Posts under ‘Here's What I Jolly Well Think, What?’
The Big List Of Fevered Mutterings (2009-2010)
It’s been nearly a year since I accidentally deleted my blog and had to start all over again.
Here’s everything that’s happened at Fevered Mutterings (v4.0) since that glorious day of rampant stupidity for which I am rightly proud. A year’s worth: most of it original, some stolen from my archives; some of it carefully considered, [...]
‘Caprica’ and ‘SGU’: Who Gets To ‘Galactica’ First?
I have two new favourite TV shows.
One of them caught me completely by surprise.
Cities: Exciting But Guilty
I’m over here this evening, flying the flag for cities and wondering where they’ll take us.
I’ve have only one major issue with cities: they inspired these excruciatingly awful lyrics. Guilty as hell. “Concrete jungle where dreams are made of?” Say again?
(No, actually don’t say again. Thanks).
Shhh! (A Writer’s Guide To Destroying The World)
Modern writers have a problem, and it’s called The World. It’s noisy and distracting.
The solution is simple…destroy it.
More on that in a minute.
Dear PETA, Yours Despairingly (Once Again)
In what is turning to be a yearly series, I’m over at EcoSalon raising a weary eyebrow at the latest antics by the People For The Protection Of Animals.
The usual arguments apply: “Any publicity is good publicity” vs. “Hey, people are animals too” (because PETA’s human rights record is a little patchy).
So it feels good [...]
The Human Scale Of Cold: How We Freeze (And How We Thaw)
What happens when you get too cold?
When we say “cold”, we usually mean one of two things. The first is the foot-stamping, hand-rubbing, nose-blowing kind that millions of us Brits are experiencing right now as we trudge through the slush, or curse when the snow billows in our opened car doors.
And then there’s the other [...]
Doctor Who Gets Whoier?
On Monday evening, a teary David Tennant stared out at 10 million of us, wailed “I don’t want to go!”, lit up like a Swedish straw goat and turned into Matt Smith (above). For the 11th time, British TV has a new Doctor Who.
An Uncomfortable Truth
Earlier in the week, I was enjoying being uncomfortable again.
Comfort is a concept I’m not…comfortable with (damn my language and its grammatical quicksands). Comfort is a state of being you should probably only dip into, to enjoy with a contrasting experience in the forefront of your memory. You stamp the snow off your boots, you [...]
It’s All In The Delivery
“Oh, we can’t guarantee when he’ll be delivering the new dishwasher”, they told my Mum. “Sometime on Thursday, definitely. But the drivers make up their own schedules to inflict maximum inconvenience on their customers. We can hear them giggling over the radio as they work them out. It’s an ugly sound, yet strangely compelling, like [...]
