Uncategorized – Page 118 – Drayton Bird Associates

Should a writer be paid more than a car mechanic?

Actually, I was going to call this piece “Drayton-Bird-Wanker” because somebody who obviously knows and hates me (no small congregation) put that up on the web so that I often see it when setting out to write one of these …

Do these phrases drive you mad, too?

There are a couple of expressions that drive me to fury. Actually, that’s a lie: there are dozens. They include “activist” which means a busybody, often bogus, who gets someone else – usually us taxpayers – to subsidise various witless, …

An Australian talking dog story

Having been brought up in a pub I acquired a taste for silly jokes that has never left me, so I liked this one, sent to me by the publisher of Meininger’s Wine Guide, for whom I am scratching my …

Richly deserved comic masterpiece

You know how every now and then you read something and say “I wish I’d written that”? For one reason or another I’m not really equipped to have written what follows, but how marvellous! It was sent to me by …

What is this noble lion doing?

Not a very clear picture, I’m afraid, but you must admit he is a magnificent beast. He is lying at, or rather carved into the bottom of the staircase at the Hotel Plaza in Rome, an extraordinary place which epitomises …

It’s a mad world we live in, my masters

Here are three things that struck me when looking at the news tonight. 1. Why do the wrong people end up running things? Or to put it another way, why does shit rise to the top? This occurred to me …

An apology – and a comment

I usually write these things late at night, at insane hours in the early morning or in spare moments – and keep making silly mistakes as a result: yesterday I wrote “worst” instead of worse. Apologies! I should be ashamed …

Why we’re in a worst state than we were

In an exchange last week I was talking about a man called Will Hutton who wrote a book essentially to promote the Bliar called “The State we’re in”. (Incidentally, you can lay odds that anyone called Will is left wing. …

Why does so much marketing stink?

It’s a small world, they say. Maybe that’s why people keep copying each other- badly. We were walking through Duke of York Square near our Chelsea flat when we spotted a sign in the window of a posh shop.It read …

Loathsome media nag slapped down. Hurrah!

My Australian partner Mal sent me this, and I must say it filled me with fierce joy. Major General Peter Cosgrove is an “Australian treasure” who was interviewed on the radio recently by one of those politically correct horrors who …