The World Cup starts today, with England hoping to be somewhere around the latter stages. I took my former in-laws to an England game once. They were Asian Doctors, and had lived for decades a few miles from Wembley yet had never been there. It was 2010 and the era of football hooligans was well … Read more
Durham is an odd place. Not odd in an exciting way — my kids always called it Dullham. But odd nonetheless. The city was shaped by two very different forces. The first is intellectual and religious. Durham is the shrine of Saint Cuthbert and the burial place of the Venerable Bede, home to an ancient … Read more
Albums of the Year Streaming platforms want music that doesn’t demand anything of you: records designed to soundtrack scrolling, workouts and shopping baskets, optimised for playlists rather than people. In 2025, the most interesting albums were the ones that resisted that logic — music that asked for attention, patience and sometimes discomfort, and in doing … Read more
