The Cheese Bar
It’s finally happened. A cheese bar has opened in London. I think on some level, I always knew something wonderful would happen in my life. When you spend this long chasing unicorns, eventually one will come cantering to your doorstep and fulfil your wildest fantasies. (I’m surprised my unicorn rocked up in Camden, but if...
Dinner at Plot
I used to think Tooting was the graveyard of Zone 3, a place where 22-year-old Corbyn supporters rent six-bedroom houses with their mates and drink beer out of shoes. But like all the once-grotty-now-edgy parts of London, it’s becoming gentrified with posh pubs and achingly trendy eating spots, all sandwiched between rubbish mounds and drunk...
Brunch at The Lighterman
Abominable snowman. The clue’s in the name really. Not abominable sandman, or abominable strawman, or abominable man sitting happily in the sunshine with a Corona and lime. The name of this feared, yeti-like creature was inspired by snow. The single worst climate creation that Mother Nature has ever bestowed upon us, snow in the UK...
How Tara Palmer-Tomkinson defined the 90s
The original ‘IT girl’, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was the poster-child for the wild debauchery of the 1990s. Tanned, toned and sporting shoes that cost more than the average mortal’s monthly salary, she encapsulated my fantasies of adult hedonism like no other. Splashed across the tabloids on a weekly basis, she became almost as high-profile as...
Recipe: Chilli pizza eggs
I have a new obsession. Bigger than my addiction to trawling the internet for holidays I can’t afford. Bigger than my teenage love affair with the half-drowned Leo in Titanic. Even bigger than my obsession with shouting things at people on Twitter who think the whole Donald Trump thing was a good idea. The obsession...
The empathy expiration date
Empathy’s a funny old thing. When it comes to three-legged kittens and fake cancer posts, the Brits dish it out by the bucketload. But while a sad-faced, one-eyed donkey pleading for human saviours can generate 14 million Facebook shares, it’s a different story for poverty-stricken migrants. “HE’S NOT 14!” A Daily Mail reader screeched into the...
Five reasons to love Richmond
It’s as aesthetically appealing as solidified dog sick, but when it comes to hipster cool points, Hackney has them in bucketloads. Crowned by the media as London’s most talked about district, edgy pop-ups are emerging faster than professional lifestyle consultants can wipe the coke crystals from their nose on a Monday morning. It’s not that...
Marriage. How old is too old?
It’s been a politically charged week to say the least. The Tories are revelling in their victory, promising to abolish The Human Rights Act, reintroduce entertaining methods of animal cruelty and stop those scrounging disabled bastards from leeching the salaries of Eton-educated self-made millionaires. The increasingly anguished left have taken to Twitter in umbrage, as though...
Dubai’s first Spartan
As someone who usually spends weekends consuming vast quantities of cheese-filled baked goods, I’m not sure what possessed me to join in the UAE’s first Spartan race challenge. Let’s call it peer pressure, or a temporary moment of madness. It started with training sessions two weeks ago, where hulking great tanks of Schwarzenegger-muscle completed squats...
Why ‘This Girl Can’ is the best advert in sporting history
Sporting advertisements don’t generally fill me with joy. Fronted by swishy-haired, ab-crunching, green-smoothie-drinking treadmill unicorns, they serve no other purpose than to make me feel as useless as I did on school sports day. I am no athlete. If anything I’m the opposite of an athlete: Skinny, squishy, nesh and all too happy to sacrifice...
Sri Lanka: Elephants, turmeric and coconut spas
“What if I fall off?” “You won’t fall off.” “They said the same thing about the Segway and I ended up headfirst in a bin next to a crowd of Japanese tourists.” I use this story as an example of my ability to attract catastrophe, because prior to this epic fall, only George Bush and...
How justice failed Reeva
Oscar Pistorious killed his girlfriend. Except he didn’t just kill ‘his girlfriend’, did he? He killed Reeva Steenkamp, an independent, successful woman, whose name barely gets a passing mention in the articles concerning her death. Reeva was a South African model who supported her family through her career. She took part in awareness campaigns on...
