Race

I LOVE THE BLACK MUSIC

Recently, I was listening to a Marvin Gaye track via last.fm—is it just me or has their sound quality improved lately?—and I noticed this at the top of its user comments: white person wearing chinos on cruise ship LOVES THE BLACK MUSIC Which immediately made me think of Stuff White People Like, a blog that’s […]

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Eternal Prurience Is The Price Of Liberty

Woman E, demonstrating again the superiority of film over digital portraiture From the BBC News Website: World motorsport boss Max Mosley has won a legal action against a Sunday newspaper over claims an orgy he took part in had Nazi overtones. The High Court ruled the News of the World did breach Mr Mosley’s privacy, […]

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Beige Van Man

[photo by Vic] Yeah, hop in; course I’m going to the reception: I’m the photographer. You with the Japanese bride or the Swiss groom? Oh, you must be one of the Swiss then. Phew. You looked a bit British at first glance. No offence, right, but you Caucasians are a bit difficult to tell apart—‘cept […]

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Apartheid For Nice Middle-Class People

I spoiled my ballot papers—one for men on one colour of paper, one for women on another colour—for Labour MEP nominations today. I scrawled through the voting boxes and wrote “THIS BALLOT IS SEXIST” (as if it needed explaining), then I put them both into the prepaid envelope. If Harriet Harman has her way and […]

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Not English

Just back from lunch watching the first half of Villa versus Newcastle at my local. (Joey Barton is a dirty…) I live dahn Sarf now so there were about five people apart from me interested in the Midlands against the North-East dotted around the fairly large TV room. In walks a big black Senegalese bloke […]

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…No Dogs, No Irish…

a bitch, currently residing at a fine Welsh bed-and-breakfast establishment[click image to enlarge it] There’s a discussion going on over at Chris Dillow’s place about whether or not guest house owners should be allowed to discriminate against gay couples. Whatever is implied by Chris’s musings on the matter, markets are not the solution to this […]

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Unseen Square Footage

A couple of years back I planned a new running scenario on PooterGeek: Tora-Bora-nation Street. The idea was simple: Tony Blair and the rest of his family would drop into the local Corrie-style corner shop from time to time and I would depict their developing relationship with the new proprietors—with the Blairs unaware that the […]

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On The Preservation Of Source Texts

Yesterday morning, I walked out of the building that my flat is in to find that the telephone box immediately outside it had been marked with words along the lines of: HEY NIGGAZ KKK 4 ME in six-inch high black letters. Today I was going to write a post about it—not an “end of civilization […]

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Jib Jab

I left The Observer on the shelf at the supermarket yesterday because it had another load of bollocks about MMR and autism on the front cover. Around the blogosphere, people who A) know some science and/or B) can be arsed to use Google show the newspaper’s science editor how to do his job: lizardoid Eustonian […]

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Ash-ian Babes

The Labour aristocracy does seem to be attracted to “sexually highly charged black women“. Not being one of Jackie Ashley’s admirers, I missed her toe-curling tribute to Diane Abbott in The Guardian—where else?—when it appeared last week, but I caught up with it via Peter Briffa: [Diane Abbott MP] was, and is, a cheerer-upper. She […]

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Lefties Sell Out

Thank you to everyone who spoke at, helped with, and attended the Euston Manifesto Conference yesterday. Every seat was taken and then some. It was a superb meeting with some of the most interesting and thoughtful lectures I’ve heard in years—and that includes the stuff I thought was wrong. One of the best things about […]

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Unrepresentative Sampling

Not owning a television receiver, being an off-peak gym member, and having friends and relatives with small children, I consume TV in odd ways. I rarely watch the box on purpose, and when I do it’s usually breakfast, daytime, and/or children’s TV. Yesterday morning, as I stretched on a mat, I read the caption on […]

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Citizen Ghale

My dad has long been associated, as a member and officer, with the largest UK teaching union, the NAS/UWT. Indeed, in classic working-class northerner style, he first had a heart attack as he arrived at a union conference. Equally typically, after it was initially misdiagnosed by a junior doctor as a digestive problem, he just […]

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Snapshots From My Glamorous Life

Last week, I noticed a registered Brighton & Hove taxi parked outside the Muslim community centre. Prominent on the dashboard was a hardback copy of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. A couple of days later I saw the car (and the book) again. This time the vehicle was being attended to by two of B&H’s […]

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“Racism is still very, very vibrant”

Last week I mentioned celebrity “people of colour” talking “po-faced rubbish” about slavery. I don’t have the time to wade through it now, but please do skim the drivelling of “Ms Dynamite” on the subject over at the BBC News Website. I’m proud to say I didn’t pay the BBC to pay this woman to […]

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It’s All In The Hanging

Jogging from the bank yesterday evening to catch Richard Brincklow‘s in-store performance at Passenger‘s launch of their new single [buy it now!*], I stopped to photograph this: Regulars will know that I am not an admirer of Banksy’s work, but circumstances and the shrewd planning of the staff at artrepublic temporarily turned the 2006 effort […]

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Say It Loud: I’m Chippy And Proud

“Chippy!” is the cry of a winner in the lottery of birth losing an argument. There’s a scene near the beginning of Casino Royale in which Vesper Lynd practises some amateur psychology on 007 as they sit opposite each other on the Eurostar. She says something like: You’re Oxford, but not from money, hence that […]

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The Peak District Massive

My sister has done her share of lecturing and teaching in some of England and Wales’s less illustrious educational institutions. Now (as I have bragged before on her behalf) she teaches law in the sixth form of one of the best state schools in the country. The school is so good she and her family […]

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Overheard In The Newsagent’s

Remember this place? Yesterday I’m in there and a middle-aged white bloke in a cravat is sounding off at the (Gujarati) proprietor as the nearest consultable expert on the question of contemporary Indian pulchritude. “Everybody says that one on Big Brother is beautiful, but I’ve seen better. She’s very pale skinned. I wonder if she […]

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M Night Shyamalan’s Signs Of Sense In The Unbreakable Global Village

[A New England meadow. A delicately beautiful Indian woman in a simple smock dress picks daisies with which to decorate her hair.] INDIAN WOMAN [singing to herself as she gazes into the forest beyond]: “बिछड़े अभी तो हम, बस कल परसों,” “जियूँगी मैं कैसे, इस हाल में बरसों?” “मौत न आई, तेरी याद कयों आई?” […]

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They Run The Media, You Know

Jeremy Paxman gets hate mail from BBC viewers who incorrectly believe him to be Jewish. Christopher Hitchens claims to be Jewish, but his brother Peter claims not to be. Most people assume Nick Cohen is Jewish, but he says he isn’t. Several of my best friends are Jewish. If I keep fixing their computers for […]

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