Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 181

Taking De-Clutter To A New Level

Today I embark on a life laundry. Our home has been stripped bare and all the furniture (except one item; my ball chair) has been given away. This just leaves books and clothes, nearly all of which have been packed off to storage. Last night I slept on a mattress on the floor, and the […]

Why You Can Be A Liberal And Still Love The Queen

After surviving the ‘Be warned he’s a far left writer’ criticism in the US and thinking ‘Hang on, I’m a middle-of-the-road liberal,’ I’m facing something similar in an online question. ‘How can you people support the Queen?’ Well, Elizabeth Windsor celebrated her 90th birthday yesterday, and is the longest reigning royal in British history, and […]

Goodbye To The North’s Greatest Comic Talent

She and I were born in the same year, and I first met her in a fringe show she performed in London called ‘Talent’. In it, two girls wait backstage to appear in a talent show. Maureen is fat, Julie is thin and hypertense. Two magicians practice a trick on them, and manage to burn […]

‘Bryant & May: Strange Tide’ On YouTube

Strange Tide Goes Out

So, last night we had the launch of ‘Strange Tide’ which my editor Simon Taylor thinks is the 13th book and I thought was the fifteenth. It turns out we were both wrong because it’s the fourteenth. I was counting ‘The Casebook of Bryant & May’, the lovely graphic novel by Keith Page, but apparently […]

An Englishman’s Home 2

The effect of needing a small plot of land and a house paid off over a lifetime kept alive a fundamental English concept; that ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’. Inthe 1930s a set of volumes entitled the Arthur Mee Children’s Encyclopedia ranan article on ‘How To Build A British House’, the end photograph showing […]

Weird Word Fact Of The Week

This came from dictionary.com but is too good not to share. Do you know what a mondegreen is? It means a word that has reached us through mispronunciation. That’s how we got what was once the 27th letter of the alphabet. It used to follow Z, and its shape is one and a half thousand […]

An Englishman’s Home 1

Or rather an Englishwoman’s home, as females are more often deciders when it comes to moving. Now that London is unliveable for most young couples people are heading out and new homes are being built. But what kind of homes do people want? The term Metro-land was coined by the Met’s marketing department in 1915 […]

Shakespeare Remixed

‘Shakespeare Remixed’ was a project that ended up wowing Simon Cowell on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, even though it left the audience bewildered (rather hard to perform against an LED screen like that, I’d imagine). But it was far from the first attempt to do something fresh with the bard of Avon. Bill Shakespeare didn’t […]

Can Stories Avoid Class Issues?

I hate rom-coms. I remember being forced to sit through ‘Pretty Woman’ and hating it, mainly because I brought the baggage of British class consciousness to the film, which then becomes about a middle-class man exploiting a working class prostitute. This clearly wasn’t the intention of the makers, who were simply modernising Cinderella, but unfortunately […]