The Griper's Times

SO many villages and towns around Britain have a story so good it would definitely benefit from what I would tentatively call a "Black Plaque" scheme. If English Heritage's little blue signs are intended to single out sites with links to celebrated historical figures, the Black Plaque - by contrast - would be the benchmark for folklore. "It was on this spot the people of Woolpit greeted the Green Children in the reign of King Stephen" or "In this place Spring-Heeled Jack caused a coach to crash in 1837." I can't imagine the idea would take off in the corridors of Whitehall but what's interesting is the way that local communities themselves often embrace old folk stories in the knowledge that, centuries on, it's still very much their thing. Let's take Bungay in Suffolk, a small market town which even today scarcely has 5,000 people living there.  Here in an August storm of 1577, a gigantic black dog was said to have manifested in the mid...

THE Christmas before Covid came I spent a couple of days working on a feature about loneliness during the festive period. I'd been struck by figures reported at a council meeting about how many millions of Britons felt isolated all or most of the time - but most especially at a time of year where we're left to assume that everyone, everywhere all at once is having the most brilliant time.  This is, as it turns out, pretty disastrous for both mental and physical health - in fact chronic loneliness is reckoned as bad for people's wellbeing as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.  Perhaps predictably my 1,500 long-read on the problem, the consequences and the admirable efforts locally to combat it joined the long list of things I wrote that fell into the "not really that interesting actually" category and an article left to be post online while I was on my Christmas break was instead left for me to publish myself in early January. I couldn't help but notice how, 12 month...

Kingfisher as depicted in a Medieval bestiary. The artist's mastery of colour is obvious for all to see. TO be perfectly clear I'm not in actual fact a twitcher. The distinction between twitchers and birdwatchers is maybe slightly blurred, but broadly speaking I've understood twitchers to be serious birdwatchers.  They're heavy-duty spotters - they have notebooks with proper margins, they know the proper anatomical names, they don't get out of bed for anything less than a life tick. But when they do they're usually up and into their wellingtons by four in the morning sharp. They're the men - and it is to be honest mostly men who twitch - ready and willing to drive the 200 miles to the East Anglian fens in the hope of spotting a passing migrant. And I don't mean the sort that The Daily Express get so angry about. Generally speaking twitchers are all about seeing as many rare species as possible, hence the long-distance trips and the constant monitoring of...

"First they ignore you , then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you ." ---  Tony Benn IT was 175 years ago this week that a small group of Victorians set-up the Vegetarian Society to promote meat-free diets. This might perhaps surprise you in a society where most men and no women had the vote, where the workhouse was a fact of life and slavery had only been abolished some 15 years earlier. Today, official estimates suggest one in ten Britons - more than six million people nationwide - follow a vegetarian diet. Obviously this means that a clear majority do not, a fact that shouldn't be forgotten by those who have chosen to make the switch. But it's obviously equally nonsense to treat meat-free diets as either new or niche - this is a growing constituency of the population, feeding a multi-billion pound industry of plant-free produce. These are facts that clearly escaped senior Tories...

DOCTOR Who is now almost old enough to qualify for a bus pass, which inevitably means it's carrying an awful lot of history with it. One of the challenges for a show with that sort of longevity is to know when to lean into nostalgia and when to emphatically say, "you know what guys, we all love the Terrapetils, but maybe we need a new start." It's a dilemma which grows over time. When the programme revived in 2005 the task was to win over those who'd grown up with the original series and a new generation of fans. At 18 years, "New Who" is itself now old enough to get drunk, leave home and buy kitchen knives. This means that those who became fans of the revival are themselves distinct from a bunch of nine-year-olds who might be puzzled to find that the Last of the Time Lords is now suddenly a man. Had I spent more time trying to grasp the complexities of dating rather than Unit dating [there's a great pun there that will land with some 0.2 per cent o...

IS there any more damning indictment of austerity politics than the fact that thousands of kids are unable to return to school because of very real fears that buildings might fall down on their heads? The crumbling of our public services is no longer a cute metaphor from hand-wringing "lefties" intent on doing the country down but a stone cold fact. Classrooms across England and an unknown number of other buildings are at risk of collapse. It is true enough that even the most sure-footed government might be floored by the infamous "events" former PM Harold Macmillan once spoke of. Only there's a curious pattern in the multiple crises gripping Britain today; the fact that the flashing lights and sirens were ignored by ministers. The events did not so much arrive unannounced but spent years loudly clearing their throats in the hope that someone sensible might sit up and notice. Fortunately for our current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, in this case of crumbling conc...

SMASH HIT: Baldur's Gate 3 was released this summer THE recent launch of Baldur's Gate 3 has led to debate about whether this is in fact the closest video games have come to recreating the experience of traditional tabletop games. It definitely feels like a landmark release - think Final Fantasy VII or Skyrim - reminding publishers that using the arcane arts to air-fry goblinfolk is in fact very popular actually.  And it will certainly set a new benchmark for what is expected from the very best RPGs on home console and PC.  But has it attained the holy grail of perfectly recreating dice and paper gaming? Will that ever be possible with pixels? Should developers even attempt to? Interestingly the efforts are about as old as gaming itself. I've recently been reading a history of the British video game industry and how early Dungeons and Dragons players were using machines likened to giant blue filing cabinets to create the late 70s equivalent of Massively Multiplayer Online R...