And now a rare video blogging moment, in which our intrepid hero visits Deepest Reading…

An overwhelmingly happy-making aspect of living in this city is the access I get to performances by bands, comedians, musicians, authors, and other inspirational creators who make it their hub and their home.  And for me, one of the foremost among these is — I say without hyperbole — Daniel Kitson.  To call him a comedian seems a bit limiting, although comedy is the attitude for which he’s most known.  I guess I’d broadly categorise what Kitson does into 3 areas:
1) Comedy, standup & short stories
2) Comic shows exploring an …

London – Eating & Drinking – Cafes & Coffee Shops – Coffee Shops
Where in the hell can you get a halfway decent coffee in Camden Town? It sure isn’t with any of the… errmm… “larger and more conspicuously branded chain shops” in the neighbourhood, that’s for sure. There *used* to be a nice place that sold Segafredo, staffed by 2 perky and strangely perpetually immaculately white-dressed blondes next door to the Jazz Cafe, but that’s no longer.
Sure, you can perambulate up to Chalk Farm Road and poke your …

It’s been bloody years since I did karaoke last, and so with the recent arrival of my birthday I decided that the arbitrary forced bit of levity I wanted to inflict on the world was a singing extravaganza the likes of which they’d never experienced.
However, it turns out it’s a little more challenging than that to get British people to do karaoke.
Not that it was ever something which we did in massive amounts back in Adelaide, but the few times I’ve done it I remembered it being quite some fun: …

London – Eating & Drinking – Pubs & Bars – Pubs
I don’t even know why we bother going into this place. Ordinarily I’d use my stock answer, “spite”, but a trip to the Edinboro Castle is totally an exercise in self-humiliation.
As many other posters have indicated, it should be a very reasonable boozer. It’s quite a roomy, airy building and the beer garden’s widely known for being one of the nicer ones around.
The range of beers looks promising, and when we were there a promotional poster …

London – Eating & Drinking – Restaurants – Mexican
In this world, you can’t go far wrong with food that starts with a flat circle of stuff. Pizza is awesome. Pancakes are awesome. A kebab can get you through in a tight situation. Pasties are quite popular, and that’s just a Cornish pizza that’s been folded in half. And I ain’t met nobody who would ever say no to a decent Burrito.
Though Tortilla was a little hard to find initially (if you approach it …

London – Eating & Drinking – Restaurants – British – Eating & Drinking – Pubs & Bars – Pubs
I think this is the first review I’ve ever written whilst still on the premises…
When you get a nice spacious, airy room filled with magnificent beers from around the world, and then put a bunch of friendly staff behind the bar, you’re on the way to having a sure-fire winner. If a review were simply about the pub, rather than the experience one has whilst there, then this’d be a safe …

(note: there are no sponsors — I just couldn’t think of a better title… which, if you look at all the other titles I’ve ever written, you’ll see is quite plausible)
I love it when friends of mine are involved in innovative public-facing software projects — for example, my mate Warren’s involved in the highly cool Sapphire plugin for FrontRow on the Mac, Chisel’s developed a Perl-based forum product called Parley, and recently I discovered that a coworker from the old days has branched into the Twitter client space: which is what …

London – Eating & Drinking – Pubs & Bars – Pubs
No matter how hard I try, I really find it hard to actively LIKE the Bree Louise.
The first thing people usually point at is the marvellous array of marvellous beer – it’s like there’s a permanent beer festival going on in there, with 4 or 5 beers on handpump on one side, and then another 5 or 6 on gravity dispense over the other side (“gravity” is the other name for when a beer cask is mounted on a rack, …

An instant feckle-raiser* to many new arrivals to Old Blighty from Australia is the idea of the TV Licence – the annual fee which owners of TVs pay, which goes into funding the BBC.  Personally I don’t mind the idea at all, and think it’s a reasonable way of funding a national broadcaster, and every now and again one gets the opportunity to see something which the licence fee is going towards which reinforces what excellent work some parts of the BBC do.
Previously my exposure to such things was chiefly …