London – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

Hackney Brook restoration scheme

Iain Sinclair wrote of when “global warming rolls a warm sea [up] the course of the old Hackney Brook.” The flow’s going to be the other way. Let me explain.

Shark jumping on Wick Road near St. Dominic's Primary School following the reinstatement of Hackney Brook.

Migrants entering Slovenia from Croatia

Plus Gibbon and Leigh Fermor on migrations past.

Karl Marx condemns organ-grinders!

“Vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars”

Membres de la société de secours du dix Décembre, dans l'exercice de leurs philanthropiques fonctions.

Two versions of Flann O’Brien’s “The workman’s friend”

With some relevant chunks of Henry Fielding.

Contemporary etching of Fielding from his <em>Jonathan Wild the Great</em>.

Reïmagining Neil Young

Something I’ve been doing ever since I first heard a taped On the beach in the squat next to Islington Town Hall on Upper Street, with Ra$ta the incontinent cat periodically tumbling from his armchair perch, suffering stoically from his compulsive consumption of any small dark lumps discovered on his quite limited travels. Not that…

Since 1995, the Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo Flood Control Authority has installed a snowman made of tumbleweed in downtown Albuquerque.

On cycling in London after an absence of some years

Everyone now has a cute little helmet. Drunken pedallers are now frowned upon. Behaving like a sociopathic arsehole in other respects remains de rigueur.

My top 10 boxing songs

All-star bill featuring Dan Mendoza aka the fighting Jew, manly Victorians, Joe Louis and the Dixieaires at the Battle of Jericho, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, Rocky Graziano aka the Maharishi Yoghurt, Bob Dylan and Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, Muhammad Ali and over-reliance on computer technology, Rich Hall and the George Foreman Grill, Wesley Willis and Batman, and Ivor Cutler.

Richard Humphries' second blocks a crucial blow from Daniel Mendoza in the 1788 bout.

Rebranding Babel

The London Borough of Newham is looking for a Professional Tutor: Our client is a single sex secondary school based in the heart of East London. […] The school is a specialist Language school and they currently offer an unrivalled range of languages taught on the curriculum and in lunchtime clubs: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, French,…

Merchants and tenants at Billingsgate Market include…

City Music Services. Let me explain. And introduce my top 10 performing fish.

Rasp along to the song of the Stoplight Parrotfish.

East London justification of the greengrocer’s apostrophe

Walking home through Hackney this evening, I met a charity shop with a sign that read, “Donation’s welcome.” “Are you sure about that?” I asked the proprietor. “Donation is welcome,” he explained. So “Apple’s £2 / kilo” means “Apple is two pounds a kilo,” there’s obviously a dialect singular / plural thing going on, and…