If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Somehow - and I don’t think anyone knows how - London Underground managed to derail two of its tube trains over the weekend. Two! One is bad enough. So of course there was a knock-on through much of the […]

Soho is plagued by the charity beggers every single day. They stand on Broadwick Street and Wardour Street with their clipboards and try to get you to sign up to whichever cause they are fronting.
Like everyone I know, I walk right past them, and then feel guilty 10 feet down the street.
But it looks like […]

Autumn is turning out to be a bit pfft. As far as the camera is concerned, it is, anyway. I made an effort to get up early but after the inevitable distractions, three phone calls and then some kitchen-based faffing didn’t leave home until gone time for lunch.
Headed north beyond Colchester and cut into the […]

God bless SNCF. Truly it is the world’s best railway company. It just goes to show what can be done if you’re happy to run it at a massive loss courtesy of several million euros from the French public pocket.
Like all great train journeys, not everything went quite to plan on the London - Provence […]

There is something appealing about closed holiday resorts where the bumper cars stand as still as the women at the donut stall, hoping in vein for a customer.
That’s what Clacton was like today. Cold. Windy. The sea whipped up by the gale, churning about beneath the pier as I trod carefully on the close-fitting planks. […]

Friday: sports. Saturday: sightseeing. Sunday: skulls. Monday: shops.

A top weekend, in spite of the impossibly early start on Friday morning. Oh, and the 40 minute delay on even leaving Chelmsford station, which should really have been expected. Nothing could be entirely trouble-free; not on this side of the Channel. Anyhow, once they’d got the broken-down […]

I ran 7.77km today. That’s about 5 miles and constitutes a record for me. I am 522 calories lighter, but my legs feel as though they have been bashed by someone weilding a heavy mallet. The wisdom of the decision to keep on running so long will be revealed over the next four days as […]

It is traditional, when you leave a magazine, for one of your parting presents to be a cover of the magazine, done up as though the whole mag was about yourself. If you work for Vogue this probably means you have a beautifully airbrushed portrait of yourself looking 5kg lighter, accompanied by some flattering headlines […]

I’m starving. Kathryn had suggested we buy food (pie specifically) before going to the pub, but of course we didn’t, and six hours later I was famished. All the shops were closed.
Anyhow, here I am, kind of droopy eyed at threeish am and I guess I should be going to sleep, but today (yesterday now) […]

I didn’t watch Derren Brown playing Russian roulette ‘live’ on TV the other night. The moment I read it would be delayed by a few seconds so the Channel 4 top bods could pull the plug if something went wrong it all seemed a bit … well … pointless.
I didn’t actually want to see a […]