Other Men's Flowers

We all resent the huge power of the supermarket chains and deplore the effect they are having on our towns, and we all get in the car and go...

I wrote last year of the irritating way in which the fine old English tradition of letting off fireworks on November 5th to celebrate the t...

Tony Blair arrives at a house in Dulwich . This is the stuff of nightmares: use it to threaten unruly children.

It seems that we and the Australians, as much as we and the Americans, are two nations divided by a common language. Wog is, to us, an impe...

There comes a point in life when one has ceased to acquire major new skills, and but still have some which need to be perfected: getting out...

It seems that my posts have once again been getting rather trivial and uninformative; there have been fresh demands that I should exercise m...

This is a an abbreviation of the title of a misogynist 16th century tract by John Knox : The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrou...

It is sad to hear that a cabinet minister has declared himself to be a “true convert” to homeopathy . Apparently his baby son’s eczema and a...

The least attractive blogs are those that consist almost entirely of links to sites that the author thinks interesting. I try to avoid this ...

The Nobel Peace Prize, awarded by a committee of Norwegians, once went to Henry Kissinger. This caused Tom Lehrer to retire, saying that on ...

I went to Valencia on business a few times in the sixties and don’t remember much about it except that you could eat paella in a sort of te...

One of the pleasures of getting older is hearing the next generation still using quaint out-of-date slang like cool , with it and so on, th...

Bush is alleged to have told a former Palestinian Foreign minister that he had received a message directly from God: George, go and fight th...

We are accustomed to the inappropriate use of powerful words, and we recognise that nowadays when there is talk of someone being crucified ...

Ronnie Barker, a brilliant comedy writer and performer, has died aged 76. His finest parts were the recidivist Norman Stanley Fletcher and t...

I have only once, and briefly, been a political activist. This was in 1959, when I worked for a few weeks on behalf of the Labour candidate ...

I have been told that in recent weeks I have been failing to maintain those high standards of political or philosophical debate and rigorous...

It's not surprising that very few of the posts on this blog attract any comments. The explanation could be that its most constant reader...

If that's the effect you're after, I suppose it's easy enough to get a hairdresser to come and walk about on your head every mor...

A woman whom I had believed to be an ardent reader of OMF has just sent me this: "I had my own blog for a while but I decided to go bac...