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It started as a fairly pleasant train journey. A woman with a half-shaved head and multiple tattoos got on pulling a French bulldog on a lead. We got to talking about dogs, and breeds, and whether Staffordshire Bull Terriers had an unearned bad reputation, and about her cats too, and was she a dog or a cat person? She said she was both, and I agreed it was hard to choose, and soon we were swapping pictures of our cats and discussing different Norfolk villages, and was Swaffham a nice place did she think or not? Both of us, I suspect, enjoyed connecting on the topic of animals with someone

It doesn’t seem like 13 years since I strolled down to the Cabinet Office after work on a May evening to enjoy a bit of protest tourism. A largeish crowd of the usual malcontents – students, crusties and the Socialist Workers’ party – had gathered to harangue the Tory and Lib Dem representatives who were hammering out the coalition agreement. The government that emerged from those talks made reducing the deficit its priority, and in those far-off halcyon days, before Brexit and Corbyn and Covid, when Donald Trump was still hosting The Apprentice, ‘austerity’ was the great political battleground. And for almost all of the subsequent five years, it was

Rome is Europe’s most beautiful city, but there’s a downside: the most famous attractions are nearly always overwhelmed with crowds. The line for the Colosseum bakes under the unbearable Roman sun; the Sistine Chapel queue snakes through the Vatican; the Trevi fountain is spoiled by selfie seekers. Fortunately, though, there is a way of avoiding the mob – and seeing a side of the Eternal City that captivated generations of travellers before the modern tourist industry took hold. The best advice for avoiding the throngs is, when in Rome, do as the Romans don’t – and wake up early The best advice for avoiding the throngs is, when in Rome,

In an attempt to sell vegan diets to parents and children, Team GB, recently partnered with Birds Eye’s vegan food brand Green Cuisine. The programme will be delivered in primary schools across the UK. Now, the Guardian is reporting that hundreds of academics are urging British universities ‘to commit to 100 per cent plant-based catering’. Why? You guessed right: ‘to fight the climate crisis’.  Some reports suggest that as many as one in 12 British parents are now raising their children vegan Research shows that veganism is intimately associated with nutritional deficiencies. A vegan diet negatively affects a developing brain, whether child or late adolescent. In Italy, after a number

The cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason recently expressed a preference for ‘folk tunes’ at the Last Night of the Proms over the singing of Rule Britannia! – and, whatever one may think of jettisoning Thomas Arne’s celebrated anthem of British liberty, Kanneh-Mason’s suggestion raises the question of what exactly English folk music is. England is not the first country that springs to mind when we think of a nation for whom traditional music is central to identity. The importance of folk music to the self-understanding of many countries in Eastern Europe is so prominent that we encounter their traditional melodies and instruments annually in more or less embarrassing entries to the Eurovision

In the summer of 1986, two men, Larry Harvey and Jerry James, built an eight-foot-tall wooden effigy of a man and set fire to it on a beach in San Francisco. The event – an impromptu bonfire attended by several dozen of their closest friends – spawned what has since become a cultural phenomenon: an event seen by some as the ultimate rejection of capitalism, and by others as a giant drug-fuelled knees-up in the desert.  I’ve noticed the changes in the six years that I have been going to Burning Man Thirty-seven years on, Burning Man still culminates in the razing of a wooden sculpture, but since then both