Sunday, April 20, 2008 “With all these people moving into the countryside comes a blandness,” observes a farmer called Chris Green about halfway through this wonderful new account of life in a contemporary English village. “A sort of sameyness about everything. Most of the new houses seem the same… there’s nothing wrong with them, but they could be anywhere.”
Monday, March 20, 2006 McDonald’s on Hounslow High Street, London, at 4 o clock on a Spring weekday afternoon. Outside, a low Tupperware-grey sky is full of cold rain and jumbo jets descending on nearby Heathrow airport. Inside, a colourful cacophany of schoolkids bunches around the steel counters, crowds around tables, and chatters in a blend of cockney rhyming slang, West Indian patois, American Hip Hop-speak, and words from the Asian sub continent. It is like a riot in an international call centre staffed by Smurfs.
Books Tuesday, December 20, 2005 In a shiny-brass-nameplated and politely portered apartment high above the traffic on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the writer Joan Didion sits in an elegant room full of memories and spectres and stories that she is trying to understand. In this room, amid the high, crammed bookshelves, the original modern artworks and the cool white furniture, dozens of old photographs show her and her husband and their daughter as a child, in parks and in busy streets and on the beach. On a window-sill there is a collection of storm lanterns, redolent of the lives of the Californian settlers, pioneers who were the writer's ancestors, and whose stoicism has been an inspiration to her in recent months. And on a sidetable there is a pile of books by her husband, John Gregory Dunne, who was also a writer. She has been re-reading all of them, looking for clues.
Books Sunday, November 20, 2005 “Oh yes, I remember going to see Kes,” said my cousin Gary Hollingworth, 49, ex-miner-turned-social worker, and South Yorkshire raconteur. “I went to see it when it first came out, we all did. I went with a mate, and both of us were interested in history, and I remember when we came out he said, That was our history, that film. And it was - not the Marquess of wherever for once, but our history. And looking back, I think it belonged to that time in the Seventies when there was that working class confidence; wages were going up so you were getting better off, and we felt as if we had power in our hands. It was reflected in what we wore - there was the skinhead thing and then glam rock, people wearing platforms and glitter, blokes at the pit with feather cuts, using after shave and deodorant in the baths and their dads pillocking them them for it… It was part of a unique time.”
Tuesday, September 20, 2005 Halfway through my conversation with Richard Bean, he cries: “The great shame of modern society is that food has lost its spirituality! And I think “OK, here comes the predictable Hugh-Fearnley-Whittingstall bit about the need to revive nettle-eating and Cornish rabbit-intestine stew recipes,” and start letting myself drift off. But this is Richard Bean, so I don’t, in fact, get the invocation of peasants and pastures past; I get a finger jabbing out of the window of our upstairs room in the Royal Court Theatre, towards Sloane Square. “Look at all those people! There are what, ten million people in this city? And they have all been fed!”