THERE’S been a lot of debate around Steven Gerrard’s appointment as Rangers manager. What bugs people seems to be this: ok, he’s done it as a player, but being a manager is a very different challenge – where’s the evidence he’s up to it?
“At the end of a shift, the streets would be filled with thousands of hurrying men, nearly all of them wearing cloth caps… It was an unforgettable sight, that tide of bunnets.
IT’S really not such a big deal any more, this quitting thing, is it? Or at least it doesn’t feel like a big deal.
EVEN in daylight, even under the spring sunshine with the flowers sprouting around, the steps have a sort of doomy gothic foreboding about them. They are vertiginously steep, dank and undrying, the kind of cobwebbed passageway that might at its higher end deliver you to the creaking door of a vampire’s castle and at its lower into the bowels of a crypt, where, one imagines, it soon becomes clear that not all the coffin lids are screwed on tight.
THE Commons vote in 2013 on whether Britain should take part in military action against Syria was a moment of intense national shame. It was also, if only we’d known, an indicator of the dark path down which our politics was headed.
IN his final decade, I was lucky enough to be one of Terry Wogan’s occasional lunching companions.
IN 2016, I joined the Labour Party.
LIKE most bookworms, if I had the choice I’d spend all day, every day, closeted away with a novel. I’m at my most content when sunk in a fictional environment, whether it be a slapstick 1950s university campus, a dystopian near-future, a high-stakes game of Cold War espionage, or the court of some venomous monarch where everyone dresses in tabards and hose and flamboyant hats and murders their siblings. I chain-read, sparking up one book after the next. I fret about the good stuff I’ll probably never get round to and lament that we don’t have two lives: one to live and one to read.
LAST year, I gave up my full-time job and went freelance.
WHAT do voters want? Do they even know? They’re clearly mad – incandescent, in fact. But are they mad and bad, lashing out unthinkingly and indiscriminately in a fit of pique? Or are they mad and smart, supporting whichever radical vehicle is best placed to represent their grievances and provide a lasting shock to a tired and failing mainstream?
