Archive for category: All articles

Here isn’t the news

18 January, 2016 (23:09) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

Here is the news. Or rather, here isn’t the news. Buried away at the weekend, the country’s energy watchdog announced that the utility companies are charging us all too much. Really? It is news that the shareholders of the privatised power firms are delighted to cash in ever-increasing dividends while old people who can no […]

A mighty affirmation

11 January, 2016 (21:12) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

IS there a mightier affirmation in rock’s rebel history than Heroes? I’m not sure that there is. When the German Foreign Office, no less, took the trouble to Tweet the link to a YouTube video of David Bowie performing it live in its birthplace, Berlin, in 2002, I thought it rude not to watch. You […]

The enemy within

5 January, 2016 (00:22) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

I wanted to write another whimsical piece this week, about my fallen apple tree. I hate losing trees. It seemed to me a perfect symbol of this miserable ‘winter’ that, with hundreds of trees to choose from on my land, with bloody hawthorns and leylandii and ubiquitous ash, the storms chose to pick on a […]

One-inch foreheads

28 December, 2015 (19:12) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

And the hard of brain struggle, once more, to knit their one-inch foreheads tight in thought. Some remove their knuckles from where they scrape against the ground and try to count to a figure larger than 1-2-lots. The brighter amongst them stare at their morning newspaper, which is either the Telegraph, the Mail, the Express, […]

A black dog isn’t just for Christmas…

21 December, 2015 (21:22) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

CONSIDERING that these days, when I sweat, beads of pure 100% hate speckle my brow, it seems remarkable to me that I have thus far survived Christmas. It has been close. Last week, the black dog was upon me and therefore you have had to manage without me, you poor saps. I find I am […]

Vote Trump!

10 December, 2015 (21:49) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

I rather hope Donald Trump is elected President of the United States of America. I think the redneck bigot crazies who have their hands wrapped tightly round the throat of the nation need bringing home to them once and for all the utter disgust and contempt the rest of the world feels for their brand […]

Taking your time

1 December, 2015 (00:53) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

SORRY I’m a bit late. Been delayed a lot today. First of all I wanted to read all the tributes to the brilliant skills and towering intellect of the now-resigned Tory co-chairman Grant Shapps. That took about 0.2 seconds this morning. Seriously. Have you ever come across such a deafening silence? Has there ever been […]

Lost years

23 November, 2015 (19:35) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

WHAT a profoundly depressing week. Have the years since Iraq happened at all? Apparently not. Back then, in the wake of an appalling terrorist outrage, the west was instructed to feed its slavering media a war: 24-hour technicolour entertainment had the inconvenient side-effect of killing tens of thousands of people, but that didn’t matter because […]

Choice B: Hope

16 November, 2015 (23:54) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

I was going to write a whimsical piece about the enormous cat Brother Bertie inflicted upon us, Captain Pusstasticus, who has been under the vet, but only after a ferocious struggle. This would have been amusing and as another bonus would have irritated old Brother Fiddle, who dislikes whimsy. But this is no time for […]

Old lies

9 November, 2015 (18:40) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

This remembrance-tide –  bow this deep, wear that poppy – typifies the intellectual poverty of this country: the idea that by putting on a sombre face, wearing a poppy and bowing deep you have done your bit to honour dead and injured servicemen and women. You haven’t. Of course you haven’t. When the pygmy’s pygmy, […]