Other Men's Flowers

I had this itch in my ear, you see. Not really life-threatening but annoying and perhaps a bit worrying. Had an ear-wig burrowed inside, as ...

It takes a really big star to stay completely calm when they photograph you just after you’ve vomited.

Thousands lined the road from Entebbe airport last Wednesday to welcome this hat to Kampala. Opinion was divided as to whether it was more i...

Here are twelve things, ten of which are considered edible, though obviously not by everyone: Fried cockchafers Sonofabitch stew Icelandic m...

Carmarthen, Dublin, Hartford, London, Melbourne, Toronto and many other towns and cities have a Trinity College , with varying degrees of di...

Most people are aware that if your surname begins with a letter in the first half of the alphabet then you have a better chance in life, sim...

If you put "Origami Bank" into Google, you will be offered 2,200 versions of the piece below, some of them dating back many months...

The modern multiplex adds nothing to the experience of going to see a film. A whiff of popcorn and the sight of a garish display of nasty sn...

A couple of days ago I posted a picture of part of a parade in Brussels featuring some marchers wearing splendid green furry costumes. As I...

I find all spectacular hats fascinating, but en masse they can be terrifying. I have no idea where these ladies were off to, or what they w...

This notice in my local hospital might have been less likely to be misunderstood if the last three words had come immediately after "ra...

This post, the twenty-sixth in the series , features the Seppelhut , traditionally worn at the Oktoberfest , the Bavarian beer festival; thi...

In my last post I wrote that I could not really see the connection between the Whore of Babylon and Hudson Bay (which the French, in that sl...

On Christmas Day this year the volcanic island of La Palma will erupt and the unstable part will fall into the sea, resulting in a mega-tsun...

… this is the sort of thing you see through the Hubble telescope. At least, it would be if you were orbiting the earth and the Hubble teles...

Here is an extract from a splendidly tumid piece of writing: Sir Granville Bantock probably has the unenviable distinction—with less than a ...

Every sensible person keeps paracetamol tablets in the house to relieve pain, and adhesive plasters in case of injury. It is also a good pla...

The received opinion is that, for America, Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’. An article in the London Review of Books by Jim ...

So farewell then, Alan Coren, the funniest and most stylish of columnists. It was a surprise to learn that he was so prudish that he would n...

[Skip this post if lieder are of no interest to you.] The lovely Holywell Music Hall in Oxford, built in 1742, is said to be the oldest pur...