Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 175

Something Lurking In The Hollyhocks…

The hollyhocks are a giveaway – it could only be an English country garden. The one at Charleston, Sussex, summer home of members of the Bloomsbury Group. It seems an unlikely place for a battle, but that’s what’s going on here. Because in order to get here we had to pass through many pretty villages […]

Binning The Box

Now that we’re changing how we view, what’s the effect on our homes? That big box in the corner is off most of the day, so why give it prominence? This is what interior designers are asking. Television has now been with us in an affordable form for close to seventy years, and in that […]

A Tale Of Two Witches

Once upon a time, North London’s Camden Town did not exist. There was Kentish Town (Kent-As-Town) above it and the city below, and the connecting coach corridor became a hamlet, then a village. While it was still a village it supposedly became the home of two witches, the Mother Red Cap and the Mother Black […]

Coming Next Month – Five Of The Best

On the 14th of July new versions of five of my novels – ‘Rune’, ‘Red Bride’, ‘Disturbia’ (no relation to terrible film with same name), ‘Psychoville’ (no relation to excellent TV show with same name) and ‘Soho Black’ – will finally be published as e-books, all with nice low price tags. This is part of […]

The New Tate Has One Great Exhibit

You realise just how many members the Tate has when most of them are standing in front of you in a queue. Last night I went along to the Southbank’s newest building, the Switch House, for a nose around. The Tate really has a thing for bricks; millions of them form the great twisted flat […]

Invisible Ink: Richard Bach

There are certain books that only college students have the patience to read. In the seventies ‘Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask’ and ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ were romping up the book charts in university towns. Each generation of wide-eyed freshers promotes one of these […]

Weird Stuff The English Instinctively Know

The news is too depressing to contemplate today. Let’s cheer ourselves up by looking at the secret stuff most British people know without even realising it. Here are the ten I’ve noticed. Feel free to add to the list… No matter how badly they did in maths, they can work out the speed and distance […]

Why Are US Newspapers Better Than Ours?

A writer at the Daily Mail once told me about her dream story for the paper; one that upsets and angers the reader in equal measure. The Mail is massively successful, selling an average of 1.5 million copies on weekdays, 2.4 million on Saturdays. Only the Sun sells more.Its readers include more from the top […]

The New Site Just Broke its Record

I loved my first website, so smart, so sexy – so unvisited. People simply couldn’t operate it easily enough and gave up, and I can’t blame them. How many times did I watch the pinwheel while trying to load a site? When we stripped back the website this week and made it less stylish […]

The Age Of Idiocracy: A Brief Guide

It now looks entirely possible that we may have a future with President Trump building walls around his country while Prime Minister Boris Johnson half-finishes corporate monuments and Nigel Farage’s police check under beds for black people. The pound is plunging. The Brexit camp is racing ahead. Gove, Farage & Johnson say they want to […]