Category: Personal

I was in London and St. Albans today, looking around at couples with and without children. I thought about the time my wife and I had together before the kids came along, and about the career thinking I’ve done before and since.

You hear a lot of people say that when you have kids, they become the most important thing in your life, and I think that’s mostly true. But as well as shortening your perspective – down from career and social life towards kids and family life – they also extend your perspective immensely. So I’ve found myself much more drawn towards projects to make a difference to the world than before kids came along – partly perhaps because I’m getting older and more thoughtful, but also because I want to make a better world for my two, and everyone else’s.

Rereading my last post, I realise that I am perfectly qualified to be a high-paid “diary” columnist on the Daily Telegraph. The Barclay Brothers can email me for the address to send the cheques.

It’s perhaps a slightly random thought, but I was listening to a piece of a ragtime music just now, and it occurred to me that you never see a piano in a pub these days. You find them in London bars sometimes – usually covered in pint-glass marks – but most landlords would no more think of having a piano in the pub than they would think of having a chamber orchestra.

This is not me being an old git – I don’t ever remember seeing a piano in a pub, with the possible exception of the Angler’s Retreat at Marsworth – I just wonder where the pianos that the cheery cockneys crowded round in the Blitz have gone. Is there a corner of the country where you can still find a piano in a pub? And if so, does anyone ever play it?

A woman is sitting opposite me on the train. For about 15 minutes she has been putting on various creams, perfumes, mascaras, etc. The latest package she has taken out, presumably to finish off the confection, is called “natural look”. Well, quite.

My friend Daryl Elfield is in the news.

One benefit of the Euro, if it ever comes to the UK, is that we’ll no longer have to watch our coffee get cold as French, Italian and Spanish trainee baristas struggle to remember which of these funny English coins is which.

There is something quite wonderful (though perhaps a bit sad) about blogging from a sun-drenched beach. Admittedly, it’s Brighton rather than St. Tropez, but it’s still pretty hot.

The beach at Brighton has free wireless broadband courtesy of Pier to Pier (ho ho).