Collected Writings

I recently performed a monologue, a ‘verbatim piece’ made up of extracts of the last written words of people who had taken their own lives. I was grateful to the surviving family members for allowing me such intimate access to such a painful and personal artefact.

It is Remembrance Sunday, 1030am and we stop, my family and I; two kids, two dogs no excuses, prompted by a display of parochial magnificence, poppies, flags and a sign reads “hot squash” these two words mashed together

For Jade March 27th, 2009 When my Mum first got cancer I must’ve been around the age Jade’s eldest son is now. Too young, in fact, to properly comprehend what was happening, only old enough to...

The foreward I wrote for Martino Sclavi’s book: It is eerily joyful to write a foreword to Martino Sclavi’s book The Finch in My Brain, because five years ago I accepted that he was going

“It’s coming home” has become a summertime idiom, replacing “Hello” as my standard greeting, the “Under His Eye” of this heliocentric inversion of the Hand Maid’s hell in which we are all now...

Well I wasn’t expecting that, were you? The mad and sudden flux of adrenaline, the gush, the knackering rush. Together alone men took their tops off and Love Island was fucked off for Gareth...

We have no meaningful wars now. Economic to the last drone-spilled drop. No principle, no patriotism in slinking off to some resource-rich-ragged land and maiming their children. Perhaps there...

When you were a kid, did you, in an appealing re-imagining of the four times table, work out your age at projected future World Cups? In Mexico ’86, when I first became ‘World Cup aware’,

Bloody hell, Love Island! What a show, what a thrill, what a seething crucible of sex and power all jammed into a hot, fake-tanned, half hour on ITV2. Forgive the zeal of the newly converted but

The NHS, it does so much and yet it means much more. When our churches just provide sets for weddings and politics provides, well, you know, where are we to project some sense of worthy...

Sometimes there is a news story that has a power that reaches beyond the material facts, even if those facts are in themselves potent.

The possibility of voting for a politician that offers change seems oddly exotic. Jeremy Corbyn has somehow been in politics for decades with his integrity perfectly preserved like his much-derided beard has functioned as hairy formaldehyde for his principles.

The fierce and insular insanity of the perpetrator. I am baffled by the scope of our human capacity to feel or not feel. To love or not love. To kill.

It is eerie and gruesome that advances in home video technology facilitated the mundane chronicling of lives that had yet to become remarkable.

The conservatives are such cinematic villains, the Etonian gits with their Freudian slips; the “West Villa United” supporting, “career-defining”, Darth Vader toffs. If you’re auditioning for heads on spikes “come the great day”, there’s no competition.

On first viewing the jarring retro-metro-racism seems like a good reason to condemn the denizens of Stamford Bridge.

This violence now though has the eerie familiarity and bilious dread of a recurring nightmare and can be pieced together with weary glances at airport lounge TVs, foreign newspapers and despairing texts from troubled friends.

Firstly, I’d like to say sorry for your paella getting cold. It’s not nice to suffer because of actions that are nothing to do with you. I imagine the disabled people of our country who have been hit with £6bn of benefit cuts

If you can’t geographically separate yourself from poverty, then you have to do it ideologically. You have to believe inequality is OK. You have to accept the ideas that segregate us from one another and nullify your human instinct for fairness.

I suppose we must each ask of ourselves – or each other, have fun with it, it could be a quiz, two fundamental questions: 1) Are you happy with things the way they are? And 2) Do you believe that things could be better?

Robin Williams was exciting to me because he seemed to be sat upon a geyser of comedy. Like he didn’t manufacture it laboriously within but had only to open a valve and it would come bursting through in effervescent jets. He was plugged into the mains of comedy.

Here I am, another World Cup, staying up late, worrying, hoping, like a heroine in a Motown song or Angie Watts, jumping back into the arms of my three-lion lover, murmuring the split-lipped refrain of the abused, “This time they’ve changed”.

In Hoffman’s domestic or sex life there is no undiscovered riddle – the man was a drug addict and, thanks to our drug laws, his death inevitable

I’ve had an incredible week since I spoke from the heart, some would say via my arse, on Paxman.

I had received “an inconvenient truth” from a beautiful woman. It wasn’t about climate change – I’m not that ecologically switched on, she told me she was pregnant and it wasn’t mine.

When I was asked to edit an issue of the New Statesman I said yes because it was a beautiful woman asking me.

I have had the privilege of scuba diving. I did it once on holiday, and I’m aware that it’s one of those subjects that people can get pretty boring and sincere about, and sincerity, for we British, is no state in which to dwell, so I’ll be brief.

I was surprised by the soundman’s impatient intrusiveness and yet more surprised as I stood just off set, beside the faux-newsroom near the pseudo-researchers who appear on camera as pulsating set dressing,

I caught up with the sad malice in Woolwich and felt compelled to tweet in casual defense of the Muslim community who were being haphazardly condemned by a few people on my time line.

I suppose that the narcissism and self-interest that motivates many entertainers is what lurks behind the ashen, jowly facades of most politicians.

It was not without significant tribal turbulence that I attended Manchester United’s 2nd leg quarterfinal Champion’s League match against Real Madrid.

It’s kind of a luxury, rent controlled ghetto for lawyers and barristers, there is a beautiful tailor’s, a fine chapel, established by The Knight’s Templar (from which the compound takes it’s name) a twee cottage designed by Sir Christopher Wren and a Rose Garden; which I never promised you.

I put Morrissey on in my car as an external conduit for the surging melancholy, and as I wound my way through the neurotic Hollywood hills, the narrow lanes and tight bends were a material echo of the synaptic tangle where my thoughts stalled and jammed.

I had to take immediate action. I put Morrissey on in my car as an external conduit for the surging melancholy and as I wound my way through the neurotic Hollywood hills the narrow lanes and tight bends were a material echo of the synaptic tangle where my thoughts stalled and jammed.

When you love someone who suffers from the disease of addiction you await the phone call. There will be a phone call.