Sex, natural history, and speech-writing; disparate activities (is natural history an activity?) linked by the absurd expectations that art creates.

How much performance anxiety is engendered by pornography? You know its only a story, and yet ...

Who would sit still and watch while a pride of li...

There’s more ➢

Two readers (a triumph in itself) have informed me that my site now looks terrible on their browsers. One even sent a screenshot, which suggests that the browser is not seeing the stylesheet. The trouble is, on my PC (at work) the site looks just fine in Explorer. So I am at a loss. I know I haven’t...

There’s more ➢

I'm useless at estimating the amount of pasta to cook. I need to weigh it. But when I tipped the spaghetti onto the scales last night out came spaghetti powder and a few teeny beetles. Not very nice, and easily dealt with, but raising lots of questions.

First off; where do the beetles come from? I...

There’s more ➢

It snowed last night here in Rome. Just a centimetre or so. Not a romantic white blanket; more a grubby bedcover that the dog had been chewing on. Down in the scrub near the river, where we walk, we were not the first to leave tracks. The feral cats, fed each day in munificent abundance by the old l...

There’s more ➢

Poor old Pim. Hook, line and sinker.

Dunkin Donuts old-fashioned cake doughnuts will be a part of a sweet and savory stuffing for a Pilgrim's Pride Whole Butter Basted Turkeys. Adding insult to injury, the bird will be brined in Coca Cola, yet another major donor, for two days.

I think eve...

There’s more ➢