In competition No. 2492 you were invited to write a piece of prose entitled ‘Irritable Vowel Syndrome’, without using the letter ‘u’. This assignment should have been a piece of cake. After all, the wild and woolly Frenchman Georges Perec wrote a whopping 300-page novel, La Disparition, without using a single ‘e’. What’s more, Gilbert
In Competition No. 2491 you were invited to submit a piece of prose describing what happens when you wake up one morning to find yourself transformed into an insect but not a beetle. Beetles were outlawed so that you weren’t scribbling quite so much in Kafka’s shadow. But in fact, the correct translation of Ungeziefer
In Competition No. 2490 you were invited to give an account of the life of a historical figure condensed into seven days. The assignment was inspired by a 19th-century nursery rhyme which tells the bleak tale of Solomon Grundy, who was born on a Monday and apparently dead by Sunday. It struck terror into me
Perhaps it’s the association with The Goodies and with Dennis Nilsen, serial killer, but people are reluctant to admit that they live in Cricklewood. ‘Well, it’s sort of on the Hampstead border,’ they mutter sheepishly, when quizzed on their new home. But they’ll be hollering it from the top of Brent Cross shopping centre before
E17 may seem an unlikely candidate to be gracing the glossy pages of style magazines, but the area — birthplace of William Morris and home to the ‘greyhound racing stadium of the millennium’ — is blossoming. These days the association between Walthamstow and going to the dogs is, in one sense at least, an unfair
These days the most conspicuous presence on the gritty streets of King’s Cross is not call girls and crack dealers but buttercup-yellow huddles of hard hats. Through the clouds of cement dust you can just about make out signs explaining that the hat-wearers are ‘considerate constructors’, motto: ‘Improving the image of construction’. This attempt at
At 8.30 a.m. on a crisp autumn Sunday a group of 20 huddled on King’s Cross station’s platform nine and three-quarters — empty but for a smattering of camera-toting Japanese Harry Potter enthusiasts — ready to embark on a journey inspired by the iconoclastic German film-maker Werner Herzog. In the harsh midwinter of 1974, Herzog
Looking out at you smugly from the pages of Get a Lifestyle, You Sad, Unstylish Person are lofters Rajiv and Zoe. The fashionable pair inhabit a loft-style apartment (please don’t call it a ‘flat’), which is probably in Bermondsey — the new Hoxton or the new Clerkenwell, depending on which property supplement you pore over
If Australia, as a nation, is negotiating late adolescence, cocksure but fragile, striving to establish its identity, then New Zealand is a child: clear-eyed, blemish-free, with a steady, candid gaze. My introduction to this gigantic adult playground came by way of a promotional video, shown by Air New Zealand on the flight from London to
I can’t imagine why people claim to enjoy camping. Before the trip – a six-week overland slog through southern Africa – I joked with friends about how impractical and ill-suited to the Outward Bound lifestyle I am; how I’m never knowingly more than six feet from a make-up bag, and am incapable of assembling, with