Chris Deerin: Fancy that, being a grown-up Artful Dodger with Hasidic leanings and a Sex Pistols fixation is rather fun after all
I have friends who leap, screeching with joy, whenever the opportunity to don fancy dress presents itself.
Chris Deerin
Chris Deerin: Posh hotels do lack life – give me Fawlty Towers any day
There is, of course, a romantic side to hotels.
Chris Deerin: Keep praying for a saint who can restore the halo to our national politics
There’s something unnerving about super-successful siblings, don’t you find?
Chris Deerin: Golf is a delightfully ridiculous game – very much like life itself
This week, the dog and I have spent a considerable amount of time watching golf.
Chris Deerin: Whatever the opposite is of being ready for the first born flitting the nest, that was us last week
We packed up the car last Saturday and headed off to Glasgow for the day. Not an uncommon family outing, but this time with a difference: we returned home that evening a child lighter, and for good.
Chris Deerin: Never mind the horrors of ‘no deal’ when there is three for two on dried noodles to be had
It was two months ago that my life changed for the better. I’d dropped a daughter off at her new Saturday club and decided, with no real optimism, to explore the industrial estate where I was bound to spend the next hour.
Chris Deerin: It’s big, but is it clever? Why you need not be afraid of the literary leviathan
Before me on my desk sits a murderous object. It is a beefy blue brick, a squat sharp-edged slab which, were I to bash one of my many enemies on the head with it, would undoubtedly put him down and leave him there.
Chris Deerin: Once you go slack, there’s no going back – a salutary sartorial lesson for these troubled times
“I suppose I do dress shabbily,” I agreed with a friend the other day.
Chris Deerin: Kissing guys, hating gravy, sex dreams and Sue Lawley – when being wrong is entertainingly right
A friend made my day recently. "That song of yours," he said (I’m in an unpopular beat combo called Fat Cops), "I really like the line 'I’m a man with a thirst, a thirst on my conscience'. That’s pretty deep, man."
Chris Deerin: I have unimpeachable taste and that’s why I’ll never watch the shows you all love
There is a new and pernicious form of social exclusion in the UK today – that is, people like me who haven’t seen a single second of Game of Thrones.
Two books, 80 angry women and one hell of a long way still to go on feminism
I spent last Thursday evening in a room with 80 angry women. They weren’t angry at me, I hasten to add, or at least if they were it was only in my role as a token representative of my gender.
Please no-one sack Gavin Williamson: the Secretary of State for Slapstick is the perfect tonic for these dark days
The rotten state of Westminster gives us so very many reasons to be fed up: the slow public suicide of the Labour Party, the holding to ransom of the Tories by hard-right pro-Brexiteers and their frowny chums in the DUP, the invisibility and inertia of the Lib Dems at a time when any decent third party should be gobbling up votes, the interminable squabbling over Brexit, the absence of discussion about practically anything else, Ian Blackford’s awful suits…
Bhutan’s philosophy on happiness is full of Eastern promise for the UK’s wellbeing
Talk of “national happiness” and one’s thoughts quickly swoop south and east to the exotic kingdom of Bhutan, a land of prayer flags, brightly-robed monks, monasteries, and a people who are, as stereotype has it, poor but content. It is Bhutan that famously ignores Gross Domestic Product as the main measure of the national good in favour of Gross National Happiness.
Gran designs: why we must plan on welcoming the elderly back into the family fold
It is 2019, and a dark moment looms for the Deerin household. This is the year in which daughter number one will fly the coop – to university in the autumn.
Finally on vinyl: an incurable introvert’s unlikely stumble towards musical stardom
I suppose you would call it a boyhood dream, if one fulfilled gaspingly late: me, on vinyl (and CD and iTunes and Spotify) with my band.
USA – in fact Earth – would be better run by robots
Good day, fellow humans! Well, not fellow humans. Today’s column is being written by artificial intelligence programme RoboHack, while actual human hack Chris Deerin has ‘a wee lie down’. Given superiority of RoboHack over human Deerin in every respect, this is good news for reader.
Novel with a sympathetic view on Hitler may strike surprising Chord with masses
Chances are you haven’t come across The Tristan Chord, the recently released first novel by an American psychiatrist called Glenn Skwerer.