FraserWords

I hope you will forgive me this week: I have been on holiday, and therefore I have been far, far too busy to produce the usual rant. Once upon a time, in days gone by, I had a little holiday ritual. I’d drive to Ashburton and the best little second-hand bookshop in the world, browse […]

I am enjoying Jeremy Corbyn’s bid for the Labour Party leadership, I really am. I don’t know what I like the most: The Tories who registered as Labour supporters to vote for him and cause trouble, only to realise they were lending a helping hand to a burgeoning movement among young people who have been […]

IN a small Dorset coastal town there’s a perfect symbol of the little England about which we’ve been talking. It’s a tennis club festooned with ‘Private, Members Only’ signs. You can spot it easily: it’s the big site with, I think, five courts and a car park festooned with more ‘private: keep out’ signs and […]

What a tiny-minded little country little England can be. Today, we are invited to be outraged at a member of the House of Lords. About what are we to be outraged? The existence of an anachronistic insult to democracy that should have been consigned to history decades ago? The payment of hundreds of thousands of […]

What it always comes down to is good against bad, right against wrong. Good: my eldest son, taking full advantage of the joys of the environment in which he’s been raised, is now of an age where he can depart for bike rides on his own of an evening. Where he goes, my collie dog […]

‘Corporate Europe will now turn on Greece with even greater ferocity, for the unelected establishment cannot afford democracy to insist upon the return of power to people. Greece’s suffering is not over.’ That’s what I wrote last week, and that’s exactly what has happened. All along I’ve said the same: business-dominated corporate Europe will not […]

Greece was the place that showed us how to do things like democracy, thinking and sport, so it’s appropriate that in 2015, it’s Greece that shows us how to be brave. It’s a lesson the southern English need, badly. For several years now the southern English have decided to support – or, in a particularly […]

While the debate about the horrific violence engendered across the world by the religio-political divide between the right-wing Christian west and the Islamic middle East centred on poor English people sunning themselves on a Tunisian beach, more serious newspapers turned their focus upon Glastonbury. Now, if you want to hear people yelling ‘vagina’ loudly yet […]

WITH a casual, contemptuous snip of his or her pincers, the Coconut Eating Crab has been about his or her work. The Crab, of course, is the malevolent deity that rules our fates on this lump of rock, tormenting us for his or her pleasure as an act of ironic cosmic revenge against his corporeal […]

WE haven’t yet discussed the Labour leadership election, which is a shame because I know your interest in the contest is so very keen. I imagine Brothers and Sisters of this place talk of little else at the dinner table. For those of you who have not yet attained your level 3 NVQ in Irony: […]