There is a difference between anarchy and chaos. Anarchy implies people being in charge of themselves and willfully going in individual directions; in contrast, chaos is apparently defined by no one being in control of anything and everyone running around in circles. Britain got a large dose of chaos yesterday. On Monday afternoon, the Speaker […]

The Parliamentary expenses scandal has soaked up British airtime like a sponge. Admittedly, it’s not entirely the fault of the media: some of the tidbits are simply too juicy to ignore. It has everything: vanity, flamboyance, greed and silliness. It makes a Monty Python farce look tame. However, this has obscured an even more important […]

I clearly recall the day when I decided to become a writer. I don’t remember the exact date, however, I know it was a Saturday in November 2003. At the time, I was living and working in London: my employer was an online travel agency, and I was managing a team which developed their websites. […]

The May Bank Holiday has to be one of the cleverest innovations that the British government has produced. Winters here can be long and depressing: they’re dark, soggy with rain, and their chill is worsened by the omnipresent moisture in the air. It’s very rare that we get a covering of snow to enliven the […]

Perhaps one of the funniest yet most obscure Monty Python sketches portrayed a meeting of senior British Civil Servants. John Cleese entered and spouted off a great deal of bureaucratic gibberish, which was then translated by his colleagues into a simple problem: the government needed something new to tax. Terry Jones then said, “…most things […]

It’s difficult to discern which of the Ten Commandments is most frequently ignored these days. Switch on a daytime television talk show, and it’s usually a toss up between “thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife” and “honour thy mother and father”: often both are violated at the same time. Perhaps it’s not entirely the […]

For those who missed it, the source of the present swine flu pandemic may have been found. According to the Times, the disease has been traced to a Mexican town of 3000 people called La Gloria. La Gloria has the dubious distinction of being located near a massive pig farm, which is partially owned by […]

There is a certain greyness to Monday morning, no matter how bright the sunshine nor how blue the skies may be. Upon awaking today, I awkwardly, sleepily made my way to the kitchen and switched on the coffee maker and BBC Radio 4: I caught the tail end of an item which said that the […]

The Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek once said you could learn a great deal about a country from its toilets. He cited three main examples: the lavatories of France, Germany, and Britain tell us, in his opinion, all we need to know about French politics, German philosophy and British economics. French toilets are basically a hole, […]

Today is Earth Day, and by all rights, I probably should be commenting on that. However, it would seem that a number of big ticket items are happening all at once: in addition to Earth Day, it’s Budget Day in the United Kingdom. We here in Britain will discover, at long last, how truly broke […]