Last weekend I went to North London with my boy Silas, to help my daughter Eddie move back to South London. And this was a Very Significant Thing. Not just because it involved a van and pizza, and a day with my guys, although all those things were perfectly lovely. No. It was significant principally …
I am not one of life’s planners. I’m not a binder and highlighter person, or a lover of the diary reminder. That’s not to suggest I’m a happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care, seizer-of-the-day. I’m just not good at planning. Many years ago, I went to a wedding. My friends David and Emma were getting married and I was …
I bought new pants last week. This is not a common occurrence. I am careful to keep my things in good order but pants, like everything else, are subject to the law of entropy. Pants wear out. Even mine. So, I bought new pants. But as I always do, when I do buy new pants, …
My Dad was a Coventry man. So was his dad, and his dad, my great-grandfather, the gloriously named Herbert Harry Harris. There are fewer Coventry Harrises now (hello, Uncle Mike) but when I was a boy there were plenty and we went there often. My memories of early childhood visits to Coventry, are mostly like …
On Monday I made the gravely ill-advised decision to play football. It was the now-annual resurrection of a game we started playing every Saturday fifteen years ago, a group of dads with our kids and their friends, then aged five. Over the years, the game embraced a changing cast of boys, girls and parents, some …
The boundaries of my little world have been collapsing lately. This is not a sad metaphor for the gentle and inevitable unravelling that comes with age, infirmity and increasing irascibility. It is a simple observation of fact. For in the winds of last winter, the posts holding up the fence between Susie and me and …
This summer, when it was really hot, I bought a hat for Brian Eno. He was about to go on stage at Greenbelt Festival to talk to my friend Martin Wroe, when Martin sagely observed that it was indeed really hot, and that Mr Eno might like a hat. So, since I was in the …
I do not possess a torque-wrench. I have never possessed a torque-wrench. It is one of the many ways in which I have failed to express that particular masculine ideal which involves a tool for every job and an intimate knowledge of how it should be deployed. Now, clearly, being conversant with tools is but …
My desk supports a whole, incoherent museum of treasures that are important to me. There are model cars from my boyhood; my Dad’s pen; sundry rocks; a leather tray from Wyoming. None of it ostensibly makes sense but all of it means something. Now, in September, my sister-in-law, Mandy and her grownup children, Adam and …
Yesterday I went to see an exhibition of work by my favourite artist. He’s an Italian sculptor who lived 600 years ago and his name is Donatello. Like the turtle. Although art historians aren’t supposed to say this sort of thing, I think he was the greatest artist who ever lived, in any medium, any …