Weekend Review 20-21 June: Wimbledon edition

In but a few short days… tennis and strawberry fanciers will gather on hallowed ground to watch another game we invented, and go through between one day to a week and a bit of agony, gasping as Brit wild card players disappear fairly early and pin their hopes on a young Scot. [...]

Weekend Review 14-15 June: A week to remember for a very long time….

Having just done a podcast with LawMinx (infra and right), I was going to go and watch Ray Mears tell me how to survive in the outback of Australia on BBC. Having footled about in my youth making fire with stone age tools for real, collecting water in plastic bags from tree leaves and [...]

Weekend Review 31 May - 1 June: Britain’s Got Drinkers….

Forget about world class dancing dogs, child prodigy singers and dancers. Literature may have Eyeless in Gaza, the film world Sleepless in Seattle - but our nation, our capital city,  has Legless in London.
Today the drinking on tubes ban comes into force. The television news programmes are full of stories about the party [...]

Weekend Review: Bank Holiday Edition (1) 24-26 May

I begin this Whitsun Bank Holiday with a reading suitable for a funeral….
Stop all the papers, cut off the net,
Prevent the backbenchers from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pundits and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the Tories come.
[With many apologies to W H Auden]
I amused myself with a glass of [...]

Weekend Review: 17 - 18 May

Chacun à son goût
I was fascinated by the latest twist in the tale of Max Mosley’s hobby of dressing up in a “German WWII style uniform”, shouting orders in German and then English with a bizarre german accent, and thrashing young women / being thrashed by young women with a cane. The News [...]

Weekend Review: 10-11 May

I happened to find myself, quite by chance, sitting in the garden at The Swan last night, talking to some good friends. As the wine flowed we started talking about Boris, advancing the proposition that he could well be the next prime minister of Britain - a view, amusingly, raised in The [...]

Weekend Review: 3-4 May (2)

“My duck confit definitely was a thing of beauty, a big alpha-duck leg, its skin crisp as Cellophane, the flesh poking out tiny, steaming fibrous fingers, the whole thing dotted with fat puy lentils and served on a creamy mash that curled round the leg like a persistent seducer.”
No… this is not an excerpt from [...]

Weekend Review: 3-4 May (1)

Well… the results are in…. Labour managed to lose 333 council seats, secured the worst poll result for Labour since the First World war, Boris is Mayor Boris now… his wife collected the newspapers in her dressing gown (a wonderful reprise of Cherie Blair’s similar antics 11 years ago), Gordon has made his phonecalls [...]

Weekend Review: 26-27 April 2008

I’ve heard of Tupperware parties. I’ve even heard of Ann Summers parties. I have not been a participant - but now there are Taser Parties
The Telegraph reports: “Miss Shafman, 35, is on a mission to persuade the fearful, but fashion-conscious, women of America to pack 50,000 volts of self-defence in their handbags.”
Excellent nonsense. [...]

Weekend Review: 18-19th April

I’ll kick off with a brief report about a solicitor MP who has been charged with criminal damage for clambering over the bonnet of a van to get onto a bus. I won’t dwell on it - but it does seem a rather bizarre thing for a lawmaker and lawyer to do. Curiously, for [...]

Weekend Review: 12-13 April

Despite announcements by Transport for London (reported widely on television and in other media) that the underground and buses were working to timetable, thousands of people decided to make their own way around the capital today by running; including six Maasaai warriors using old car tyre rubber for shoes. Just a week [...]

Weekend Review: 5-6th April 2008

On a day when the arctic winds return to Britain… and West London once again faces the prospect of sleet and snow drifts, one of our judges has stirred things up today at a conference by claiming that ‘family meltdown’ will be as catastrophic as global warming.
6.15 pm is a bit early for [...]

Weekend Review Sunday 23 March: Urbi et Orbi…

Implausibly, but entirely in character for this time of year, I found myself at 6.30 am this morning standing in the back of a truck reviewing Russian troops - a curious thing, it has to be said, to be doing on Easter Sunday. But there you are. What the troops were doing in [...]

Weekend Review 15-16 March

In my other guise - I am covering the ALT Conference at Oxford University - so, I have been unable to blog this weekend. I am doing this remotely - in the form of podcasts with speakers and we are providing a television crew to film a couple of key note speeches on the morrow. [...]

Weekend Review 8 - 9 March

Henry Porter on the erosion of civil liberties in Britain. A well constructed and impassioned piece…
My thanks to Geeklawyer for reminding me of an excellent piece by Henry Porter in the Observer today - a thought provoking article: “Why I told Parliament: you’ve failed us on liberty.”
A Tale of Tourettes
RollonFriday can usually be [...]

Weekend Review Part I: 1 - 2 March

HRH The Prince of Wales wearing a leek on St David’s Day. (BBC picture)
One presumes, not without reason to do so, that the leek is organic? HRH is wearing a Household Cavalry tie, as far as I can see - understandably, given that he was picking up Prince Harry who is an officer in [...]

Weekend Review: 23-24 February

Quite a busy week in the news… so, today, I have a mix of text, podcasts and even a bit of film.
First, I talk with Carl Gardner, author of the Head of Legal Blog, about the need for a national DNA database. We then have a look at the political situation in [...]

Weekend Review: 16/17 February…

Hat Tip to Reactionary Snob, for alerting his readers to the story below:
As Reactionary Snob puts it….
“And people wonder why red-faced buffers like myself don’t trust the government or the mandarins of the Civil Service… This shower couldn’t organise a blowjob in a brothel with a bag of diamonds. I don’t know what is [...]

Weekend Review Part II - 10th February: A collection of matters….

Part II, as promised, follows Part 1, below. I have come to the conclusion that a 45 minute radio download with 4-5 short podcasts is not the best medium. I am settling on a pattern of a mix of text and separate short podcasts so readers may listen to / read what [...]

Weekend Review Part 1: 9 February - I meet King Arthur at The Bollo…

Tonight I went to The Bollo, as I often do on a Saturday night. I met King Arthur… but before you form the view that I may have taken too much juice… I actually met King Arthur before I had even sipped the first taste of Rioja.
Let me explain. King Arthur is [...]