I was wrong. I admit that now, though I still think I was wrong for the right reasons. If you recall, I couldn’t get behind the hounding of Dominic Cummings because I didn’t think what he did was wrong. Looking after your child shouldn’t be something that weighs against any parent and I don’t care […]
Continue Reading
Unless I find time later in my day, just a brief update… Wednesday morning, I wrote a new piece for Reaction, which you can read over there. I usually write a piece each week and I should try to remember to link to them when I can. My new piece deals with one of my […]
Continue ReadingHere’s my dilemma, which perhaps I’m uniquely qualified to explain because only I would be dumb enough to admit it… I’m worried that the virus might not come back. So, okay, I phrased that in the very worst way because I’m being deliberately provocative. Obviously, I don’t want the virus to come back. I want […]
Continue ReadingA pandemic lockdown is probably not the best time to consider turning off Twitter for good yet here I am considering just that. I also admit at the outset that I’ll probably fail… Even when I try not to read Twitter, my Twitter shortcut is the first thing I reach for whenever I open my […]
Continue ReadingA few days ago, I sat down to write my hot take on the Dominic Cummings story and this is as far as I got… “Meh.” I know, I know… Hugely disappointing, I’m sure. Don’t @ me. I know this is the bit where I’m meant to mine deep seams of filth to describe the […]
Continue ReadingBit quiet yesterday. I was trying to think up some cartoon ideas (came away with about five or six) plus there was a “major incident” in the town. A recycling depot caught fire and caused a blaze that people could see as far away as Manchester to the east and Formby on the coast to […]
Continue ReadingAll kinds of things I want to do today, and bottom of that list was to write something for the blog. Lucky if I get two hits a day at the moment but, then, I should appreciate those two hits and I do. Hence my sitting down and writing this instead of drawing cartoons, which […]
Continue ReadingLord Sumption is at it again, writing from his place at the high table as one the UK’s top jurists… And, yes, it’s important to note that I did write “top jurists”. I didn’t write the country’s top epidemiologist, virologist, data modeller, or mathematician. Nor is he an economist, behaviouralist, or even a scientist of […]
Continue ReadingIt’s been an emotional week, but I can’t decide if that’s because of the caffeine or the culture war… I do know I’ve been feeling a bit fraught; on a slightly paranoid edge that I can’t totally explain. Part of it is certainly down to an excess of caffeine. I normally limit myself to the […]
Continue ReadingA brief dalliance with white bread knocked me out of my stride earlier in the week. I can’t eat it. I shouldn’t eat it, yet I do have the occasional craving for it and I also sometimes indulge. When that happens, I usually end up feeling flat for a couple of days. I’m a Byronist […]
Continue ReadingWords can be terribly slippery. William Empson in his seminal work on ambiguity from 1930 described the effect of these semantic slips as being either “witty or deceitful”; you can look on the effect of ambiguity as providing interpretive freedom but also the chance they’ll simply steer you in the wrong direction. Poetic language pivots […]
Continue ReadingForcing myself to write today. Having one of those dips in productivity that come with a dip in confidence. Wish I had some elaborate psychological explanation for it but it’s all pretty mundane. The blogging isn’t going great. Terrible numbers, even for work like my Farage piece which I thought was pretty strong. Very little […]
Continue ReadingI should probably not blog when I’m angry, but nothing rankles me more than a bully. Punch up not down is my guiding mantra, and I’m always happy to swing a fist to help the underdog. But onto this blogpost and the fact that the lockdown has eased… I write this ahead of whatever Johnson […]
Continue Reading
It’s a warm lazy Saturday so I thought I’d give my brain a bit of a workout and paddle it around that husk of nothingness floating in a sea of irrelevance that is Nigel Farage. I drew a cartoon yesterday in a fit of… well, “pique” isn’t the right word. It makes it sound too […]
Continue ReadingToday is the seventy-fifth anniversary of V.E. Day and another chance to reflect on how I have something wrong with my brain… I always feel like these around these big commemorations. The fact that World War 2 lasted about six years means that there’s always another landmark divisible by 5 around the corner. If we’re […]
Continue ReadingWhy Dunciad.com?
It’s a cool domain name and it was available. Yes, I know. Available. Crazy, isn’t it?
Really?
Yes. It also helps that it’s also my favourite satire written by Alexander Pope, one of the most metrically pure English poets who also knew his way around a crude insult or two. If you’ve not read it, you should give it a try.
So this is satire, right?
Can’t deny it. There will be some. But it’s also an experiment in writing and drawing, giving work away for free in order to see how many people are willing to support a writer doing his thing. It’s the weird stuff that I wouldn’t get published elsewhere in this word of diminishing demands and cookie-cutter tastes.
