October 2006
→ Pointe
(31st October 2006)
I am not a dancer. Neither disco nor drunken nor proper. But sometimes when I'm asked - rarely - to name a favourite piece of writing, I refer to a 5000-word or so feature that appeared in the New Yorker, which was about ballet shoes. I read the whole thing though I have never been to a ballet in my life.
Until last night, when ...
(30th October 2006)
From the Mairie de Toulouse, a campaign dedicated to cleaning up the five tonnes of daily "déjections canines" - dog shit - deposited on the city's streets. And a jolly campaign video which YouTube thinks "may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube's user community."
(27th October 2006)
During my time at COLORS magazine (which was brilliant and is now rubbish), I had to write about all sorts of odd things. A pill that makes excrement not smell (it didn't work). Sex finger toys. How much it costs to bury a corpse in a small town in Italy. What it feels like to nearly die. Why South Koreans don't like having their ...
(27th October 2006)
Hackney is apparently the worst place in Britain to live, according to the wise minds who produce a property show on Channel 4. Obviously, people who make property shows are idiotic, especially when they employ a presenter only because her more famous sister is pregnant. Allsop? Female? You'll do. And also obviously, the critieria, while supposedly consisting of crime statistics, "lifestyle," environment ...
→ Run
(23rd October 2006)
When I was small, I ran away a lot. This lasted until my early teenage years, by which time my mother had gone through various grades of hell. The run away and easily found hell, the run away and out for a couple of hours hell and the run away and called the police hell.
I would run away whenever I lost an argument, or ...
(23rd October 2006)
In 2002, I was sent on assignment for Glamour magazine. It was six months after NATO had liberated/bombed the buggery out of Afghanistan, and Number Ten wanted the biggest-selling women's magazine to send an intrepid reporter out to Afghanistan to report on the newly liberated women of the country. I was the intrepid reporter, and the intrepid photographer was the deeply talented ...
(18th October 2006)
"We have gone about the adoption procedure according to the law like anyone else who adopts a child," she said in a statement, adding that she had wanted to "open up our home and help one child escape an extreme life of hardship, poverty and in many cases death".
Madonna can beat death. Amazing.