The Griper's Times

"We should treat the 2017 manifesto as our foundational document, the radicalism and the hope that that inspired across the country was real." --- Keir Starmer, January 2020. EXACTLY seven years ago this week I was stood in the city centre getting - what the kids might describe - as "low-key pissed on" with a pretty big smile on my face. The "get out the vote" rally was organised on the eve of the eve of the election it's generally hoped we've forgotten these days. If only because the shock surge in support for Jeremy Corbyn might give the strange impression that socialism can be quite popular actually. A few thousand people - most of them young, many of them with more interesting haircuts than mine - had flocked to Birmingham city centre to see the then Labour leader speak. Every poll going was predicting a Tory landslide, Corbyn himself had been traduced and abused as everything from a terrorist-sympathiser to a Jew-hater to the most dangerous al...

AN OBVIOUS but often unnoticed consequence of the death of the local paper is that future history might be rather flimsier than today's. I'm about to start work on my dissertation, which will delve into the Welsh workhouses of the nineteenth century. An obvious advantage in trying to understand social conditions in this period - compared to say 1512 - is the increasing abundance of press coverage which offers insight into daily life at the level of local towns and villages. While no source is infallible, print journalism was a form of record-keeping that tilted coverage much more firmly in the favour of ordinary people.  Initially of course such outlets were not the platforms of community news they would later become but fast forward to the twentieth century and titles were undeniably offering your average resident a platform. School fetes, political rucks, footie matches, live shows and crimes were set in type and published. One of the few joys of my brief stint as acting edit...

THEY talk in hushed whispers in a hundred and one creative writing classes of the writer finding "their voice". Which might imply that there's some triumphant moment when you can suddenly draw it like a sword from the stone and bellow defiance at the heavens at your new-found authorial authority. I suspect though it's more a gradual process of feeling your way with sentences. At some point eventually you squint down at the page and think "oh, yeah, I do tend to do that don't I." Except I'm never sure I've ever even quite done that, so here I am on a chilly Monday evening, trying to. Here goes. I'm probably a writer who likes testing what he can do with the language. I like assonance, I like the way sounds repeat, I like the way you can really rub your reader's nose in a point. Then let go. Because speed makes it urgent. Maybe. That sort of poetry in prose approach comes, I think, from my love of Ray Bradbury. If it's possible to imagi...

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...