I'm not writing a review. Alexis Petridis has done that far better than anyone else could, really. I just wanted to point the album up. It's fantastic. I remember going to interview Stornoway a year and a half ago. They were barricaded into a little student pad in Cowley (ref. Zorbing). I stashed my bike somewhere shady in their front yard and found my way inside to a room full of a piano, PA boards, cables, a drum kit, three or four guitars, a very pretty bass and three out of four of the band members. I interviewed them terribly before they gave beautiful renditions of We Are the Battery Human and a song about sushi which hasn't made it on to a commercial release yet as far as I'm aware. "We like eh... seabirds... eh... I'm speaking for myself, really... and, eh... kite-flying," said Brian.

Their album, Beachcomber's Windowsill, is lathered in their Outer Isles folkloric styles, just as it should be, and looks like a success already on iTunes, with 62 customer reviews averaging a solid 5-star rating. Check it out! Be a fan.

Shipping containers have been transformed by the excellence of a BBC 4 documentary this week into moving and abstract signifiers of social change in Britain during the latter half of the 20th century. The programme was a beautifully made and characterful investigation that took into account the years of maritime trade that kept Britain's Empire afloat before globalization moved trade lines away from the traditional centres of export and import; London and Liverpool.

Musically imaginative, colourfully shot, and punctuated by spot-interviews with all sorts of people connected to the 'shipping container story', The Box that Changed Britain made an admirable stab at chronicling the history of a revolutionary invention and charting its socio-economic impact in the years following its introduction. Shipping containers are often grasped at by economists (like Robert Reich) who are explaining the meaning of 'globalization', as a perfect example of how globalized industry was made possible in the first place. If you need help comprehending the effects of that globalization, the do... READ MORE >>

On Sunday I flicked through the latest, disappointingly unsatisfying issue of the Observer Food Monthly magazine and came across the lead article in which husky pearl Mariella Frostrup reminisces about childhood eating in Norway. Frostrup, alas, sounds better than she reads. Maybe that's unfair. My main criticism of the piece is its unrelenting invitation to experience someone else's memories and moments of emotional significance. It's interesting to a point, and informative of a totally different food culture, but eventually the repeated invocations of an alien childhood start to get a little awkward.

"Gjetost, as it's also known, is made from the whey of goats' milk and with its sweet, caramel taste it's not to everyone's taste. Hence my theory that deep in my subconscious memories await being reawoken by my childhood palate formed in 1969, the year that Norway's oil boom began." Um, all right, love. I'll get the bill.

But what about the delightful, delectable, Delicious Miss Dahl. A juicy number in her own right. Nigella 2.0 gets good marks for presentation with her indie-infused domestic boudoir-ness and emphasis on "home-cooking" which, unlike Nigella herself, is fantastically practical and straight-forward. Without even being ... READ MORE >>

I don't have a very good track record with birthdays. My 12th and 13th were particularly woeful  and nerdy affairs. On the former, I was stood up by my best friend and had to teach my other (hopelessly gangly) best friend how to ice skate. I wasn't successful and only remember accompanying him as he tottered around the edge of the rink, clinging in terror to the high plastic barriers surrounding us in our painfully arctic prison.

This was bad, maybe, but the gods had saved up a real whopper for my lucky 13th bash. I found myself staggering around Lazerquest in excruciating pain, conceding point after meaningless point to my athletic guests before stumbling towards the bathroom, writhing in agony and - I remember it vividly - actually gasping for air. It wasn't a stray laser-beam shot through my brain, but, as I later found out, appendicitis. Back at my house my friends watched the movie I had picked out while I lay in bed wondering what was wrong. When it was time for them to leave they visited me one-by-one at my bedside and I thought how pants it would be if this sordid birthday would turn out to be my last.

Your 21st is supposedly the most important birthday of all. I'm not sure why, actually. In America they stop turning a blind eye to your illegal consumption of alcohol, but in Britain they stopped doing that three years ago. What barriers are left ... READ MORE >>

I'll try and do this without spoiling the plot for anyone who hasn't seen A Single Man.

The Phoenix was about three quarters full last night for the 6.45pm showing of A Single Man. Air conditioners whirred silently somewhere above the seating and as a result was the smell of night air drifted intermittently over the audience, making the experience of watching Tom Ford's much-lauded offering all the more organic and dreamy. It was one of those slumped-as-far-as-you-can-slump-in-the-fold-down-seats sort of cinema-going experiences.

Colin Firth's pensive performance as gay English professor George Falconer was fascinating to watch. We observe his character coping (or not coping) with the death of lover Jim (Matthew Goode). The narrative is spliced with flashbacks and unobtrusive voice-over narration from Firth in one or two places - all of which is helpful in rendering the anguish of Falconer's loss as a catastrophic but now muddled, fragmented in retrospect, and numbing burden.

The poster for the film, plastered on the exterior walls of the Phoenix, includes a quotation from some newspaper or magazine claiming that it is the most sensitive performance of Firth's career. This is probably true, but Firth's portrayal is hampered by some apparent conflicts of interest between tone and plot courtesy of the script. The attempted suicide scen... READ MORE >>

How does the media handle catastrophic natural disasters? There have been enough of them in recent years to make a study of journalists' approach more than viable (and valuable). I used the word 'handle' purposefully. 'Handle' is a good term because it signifies some sort of administrative contact, but of an officious, utilitarian and sometimes awkward sort. It also realises here the sense of a job being done, but with a significant degree of ethical or professional integrity at stake. All 'news' is, after all, reality handled by reporters, newsreaders and editors.

This always forms the basis of any inquiry into how media organisations have represented a given situation, person or persons. But with natural disasters of a colossal scale, the hands of news-men are always gripping their subject differently. Haiti's earthquake is one of the worst in anyone's living memory, wherever they are. The death toll is astonishingly high, relief workers took days to fully investigate the situation, and the resulting atmosphere in the country even now remains critical. There is rioting and looting, there is the ever-present threat of disease - and the world is watching. It seems to me it is also flinching.

The Haiti disaster is almost incomparably, incomprehensibly huge. Numbers telling of hundreds of thousands killed are coldly statistical, difficult to c... READ MORE >>

Year two. Day two. Obama is in Elyria, Ohio, on a trip to help him re-connect with the electorate that voted him into power just over one year ago. The issues that have flared up in the president's face in the last 367 days, and particularly in the last two months, have cost him his comfort zone in the polls and encouraged pessimistic analysis from media commentators.

Ohio was a chance to go back to the drawing board. At a Q&A in Elyria's town hall (which must have been a nostalgic culture shock for the Washington-weary campaign whizz), the president reminded his public that he didn't ignite his healthcare initiative to maintain or improve his polling results. He didn't map out the banks' recovery plan to score "political points" for himself and his administration. "This is not about me" he insisted, "this is about you." There was a flurry of one-liners like "we want our money back" and "I'm ready to have that fight." There were direct and resilient responses to recent criticisms. It's exactly the line that needs to be stressed right now and the last handful of White House blog videos clearly shows the reset tack being taken by Obama's speechwriters and press men.

This was level-headed, energetic, point-by-point - and often good-humoured - rhetoric, the like of which has been sorely missed by Obama's staunchest supporters in recent times. Apart f... READ MORE >>

365 days later, the mood is very different. But only in the minds of millions of Americans. Not so much in Obama's. On inauguration day 2009, the new president told his nation that he was "humbled by the task before us." Not before him, but us. Obama is still humbled, probably to a much greater degree now than then, if the opinion polls are anything to go by. But I'm not sure how many American citizens were ever humbled by what they had to do. How they had to approach the next four years. It was 'yes we can' not 'yes I can.'

It's why the economy is the real sticking point. It's the pain that so many of Obama's citizens are feeling on the ground right now. Most were feeling it before he was even elected. The crash hurt so badly that it, after a false start, helped to sweep the president to victory along a raging torrent of 'hope'. Hope that couldn't quite be fulfilled. Not yet, anyway. And America is playing the petulant child in turning its back on Obama one short year later.

Simon Schama's serialised dissection of presidential failures and wavering promises is crudely predefined by a pessimistic hypothesis, but the latest episode remained fascinating in its portrayal of a strong and tr... READ MORE >>