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The local Jaguar car dealership has closed overnight! I passed it yesterday, glancing enviously at the forecourt as I always do, admiring the row of sleek powerful machines waiting to be bought. This morning the forecourt is empty – save for a skip containing
… more → I have just discovered a great app for your iPhone or Android smartphone. It’s a full-featured satnav for cyclists and pedestrians. This means it will navigate a route on cycle paths and quiet roads and use bike-friendly cut-throughs and short-cuts where available. It even avoids hills if possible, and will show you A to A leisure routes from and back to a specified location. It’s free from Bike Hub thanks to a voluntary bike industry levy. If you fancy dining out, how do you know whether a restaurant has good standards of hygiene? It’s important to know, because you can get ill or even die from food poisoning. Have you ever asked for a quick look in the kitchen before taking your seat? Or do you assume that environmental health inspectors keep a close eye on every establishment? Perhaps you judge by front-of-house appearance, or rely on reviews by food critics and members of the public. A bit indirect? A more objective source of information is
… more → Here’s a money making tip. As student Simona Bonomo discovered, all you need to do is make a video of iconic buildings in London. OK they don’t pay you straight away. In fact it’s fair to say there is some hassle involved. But it might also give you first hand experience of the Stanford experiment forty years on.  Heaton Moor Medical Centre  Stockport features at Number 12. I wonder whether the authors had seen this local feature when they were compiling their sideways look at modern Britain? Perhaps not, for if they had, then surely Stockport might have been put a notch higher in the rankings?
It’s outside a health centre and appears to be a manhole cover dedicated to a nurse who worked there for a year. Now, on the one hand it’s touching that her passing is marked for posterity. She evidently was missed – presumably by her colleagues – and I can only assume that her death came unexpectedly soon after taking up her new post. In publishing this photograph I have no wish to make light of others’ loss or to be disrespectful to her memory. It just strikes me as somewhat unfortunate that an item of galvanized drainage furniture was chosen as a symbolic tribute to this person’s life. Fucking, boring. Factual TV programmes abound. From economics to art, from astronomy to natural history – there is no shortage of documentaries to educate and entertain for the price of a TV licence. I like learning about science and technology. Tomorrow’s World was a weekly favourite, although thirty five years later tomorrow has truly been and gone and we’re still waiting for most of the products featured in prototype on that programme.
… more → Right from the opening credits – with a throbbing Led Zeppelin (cover) soundtrack – you know you are watching a well-crafted film. Such a good start meant that I was able to relax, settle into my seat and prepare to immerse myself in the cinematic experience. I admit that this trance was briefly disturbed early on when Daniel Craig asks for a specific brand of cigarettes. I hoped that such product placement wouldn’t be peppered intrusively throughout. Thankfully it wasn’t – apart from
… more → I hugely enjoyed Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City but his latest nostalgia-fest is a curate’s egg. Davies creates rich, sepia scenes of ’50′s Britain at least as evocative and depressing as those in 10 Rillington Place. Rachel Weisz does an outstanding job – in more than one sense. For whilst her performance is convincing as the camera lingers on her beautiful tortured expression, the film’s backdrop is an array of caricatures sprinkled with scenes of ludicrous sentimentality with an often intrusive soundtrack. I’m thinking of the sing-song in the boozer, and the London underground during the Blitz both of which are almost pastiche. Weisz’s lover is supposed to be a self-centred cad, but is too one-dimensional to be either a convincing villain or the object of her lust. Simon Russell Beale has a better time of it as the pained and repressed cuckold. North American manglers of the English language have long since adopted the phrase ‘different than’ but I notice that more and more speakers of British English are saying ‘different to’. When comparing things, we are deciding if they differ from each other. Not to or than each other. |
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