About that Olympic host city...

Very pleased the other day to get my contributor copy of London After Recession: A Fictitious  Capital?, published by Ashgate on 28 Sep 2012 (ISBN-10: 1409431029 and ISBN-13: 978-1409431022). You can pre-order it at the links below. My chapter is called "Farewell Nathan Barley? The Rise and Declineof the Freelance Creative".

Did the earth move for you?

Opponents of the high speed rail-link are already speculating about the safety consequences of new underground tunnels. They could have a point. Look closely at the "Phase 2" map above, copied from last night's Evening Standard. The East Midlands have already shifted to somewhere north-north west of Birmingham, and work on the new train line has not even commenced yet.

Antinomies of Futurology

'Thanks to modern communications - email, MMS messaging and, in particular, Tweets - we were able to find out what the ordinary Iranian people were feeling without filters, restrictions or censorship. Truly amazing.' So says Richard Bacon, writing in Tuesday's Sun, in a 'personal view on how technology shaped the Noughties'.

Maybe. The pace of technological change is truly impressive these days. So how come the BBC still finds it impossible to pay my appearance fee for being a guest on his show in 2009?!!?

Eco towns and the uses of English

A recent snippet in The Times caught my fancy, when coverage of eco-towns threw up the following:
"All four in the first wave will be expected to have a zero-carbon school by 2013, and parks, playgrounds and gardens will make up 40 per cent of the towns. At least 30 per cent of affordable housing will be required, with one member of each working couple expected to work in the town." Are we to take it that 70 per cent of the housing will be unaffordable? Probably.

My hidden hand

I am one of the writers of the document at this link. Hold onto your hats, readers ...

The League of the Just ...

The weekend is closing in and individual summer holidays are starting or ending. Various last-minute headaches are passed onto my desk, from people who are either on the brink of going away or recently returning to an overflowing inbox (and not just from Facebook notifications).

One of the few sensible observations in Theodore Dalrymple's otherwise dismal book Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass is the way felons use the word "just" to minimise the seriousness of their crimes, as in "it was just a poxy fractured skull".

Countless people in the modern workplace deploy the same technique, as in "would you mind just having a quick look at this before close of play today?" Before long even purists like myself are doing it too, just prior to requesting something absurdly inconvenient.

There's no justice, there's just "just".

A hack keeps his hand in

7 Days, the local equivalent of Metro, has got itself a new book reviewer. Nice work if you can get it.


As for the book itself, you can buy it here: