The Irresistible Lure of the Linear

Straight lines. Great aren't they? With straight lines we build barns, houses, bridges and roads. With ruler - or straight edge - in hand, our engineers design piston rods, pipelines, train tracks. Even artists use them to help create the illusion of perspective. The humble straight line has been responsible for countless advances in the modern …

Freedom Lost

I was lucky. I was born in the nineteen-sixties. I grew from babe to child in the second half of that decade, and matured into a teenager during the colourful and spectacular nineteen-seventies. I consider this timing to be fortunate because it seemed to me then - and still does - to be a time in …

Jazz. Rooms.

It is nineteen ninety-three perhaps, or maybe ninety four. Whatever the year, it is certainly late. It is nearly one o'clock in the morning. We are in a dark roughhouse basement room. The walls are carelessly painted in a matt black emulsion as are the wooden benches that occupy various spaces around the perimeter. However, it is far too dark …

News – huh! – What is it Good For? (Say it again)

Have you ever seen the once-familiar in a whole new light? Looked really hard at something (or someone) previously taken for granted, and regarded it/them completely differently? It happened to me once at junior school. I remember staring at one of my then friends. It was strange. It was like I was doing so for the very first time. A train …

Pop Goes The Freedom

The creation event of twentieth century popular music - its big bang if you like - can, to my mind, be traced back to a singular event in January 1865. That moment could be characterised as a dark black explosion, the shock waves of which reverberated for the following one hundred and fifty years. Despite the myriad …

The Commuter’s Prayer

May I never become A brain dead commuter Sleep deprived and cowed; Hollowed eyed, drinking in The intellectual poison of Metro