John Walsh

Prolific writer and commentator John Walsh contributes two weekly columns to the paper, Tales of the City and BTW, as well as writing features, interviews and restaurant reviews. He has been editor of The Independent Magazine, literary editor of the Sunday Times and features editor of the London Evening Standard. His latest novel, Sunday at the Cross Bones, was published in 2007.

John Walsh: Tales of the City

"Would you like," they asked, "a trip to Ibiza? We're off on Sunday." My brain was a-flutter with images: the broiling Balearic sun, the huge nightclub mirrorball bouncing coins of light off the naked shoulders of cavorting 18-year-olds from Surrey, the yachts lined up in the harbour at sunset where you sip your fifth Shag On The Beach cocktail, the teeming streets of the capital thronged all evening with beautiful people, the alarming white tablet given to you by the mysterious blonde in the silk halterneck...

Recently by John Walsh

John Walsh: btw

Saturday, 5 July 2008

Uh-oh. We really must be in trouble. "Sub-prime" and "credit crunch" have just entered the Oxford English Dictionary. They're Americanisms, and they're a bit weaselly ("sub-prime" means "sub-standard," not just "less than the best") but they're here to stay. Also granted full OED status is "fascinator" meaning the feathery frou-frou clamped to some ladies' heads at Ascot, "freegan" (a person who lives off discarded food) and "sleb," a contemptuous reference to celebrity. The term "bling-bling," meaning ostentatiously worn fashion jewellery, joins "jiggy," "phat" and "breakbeat" in the hip-hop lexicon. It was coined in the 1990s by the rap team Cash Money Millionaires, one of whom, BG, released a single called "Bling Bling." "I just wish I'd trademarked it" said a rueful Mr G.

John Walsh: So he dashed it off. But that doesn't mean it's not art

Wednesday, 2 July 2008

Kinetic art has a perfectly respectable pedigree: it's defined as "art or sculpture in which movement (produced by air currents, or electricity, or sound, etc) plays an essential part". What's a little out of the ordinary at Tate Britain this week is that, in Martin Creed's new "Work No. 850", the movement is produced by having athletes run, hell-for-leather, past the spectators.

John Walsh: btw

Saturday, 28 June 2008

* This week's award for faultless logic goes to Ms Petra Faile, a Dutch housewife who, like thousands of her countrymen, believes the world will end in 2012. They're devotees of the Mayan civilisation that flourished from AD300 to 900, whose calendar ends on 21 December 2012. Many Dutch people are building bunkers and boats while waiting for the apocalypse. But which event will destroy Holland? Petra believes immigration will trigger it. "In another four years it will be all over," she says. "They keep letting people in, and then we have to build more houses, which makes the Netherlands even heavier. The country will sink even lower, which will make the flooding worse. But maybe it's not so bad that the Netherlands will be destroyed. I don't like it here any more."

John Walsh: Tales of the City

Tuesday, 24 June 2008

Are we about to see a spate of match-fixing at Wimbledon? Last month, a report commissioned by tennis's ruling bodies claimed "criminal elements and possibly organised gangs" were preparing to corrupt and/or bribe players and officials. Should we brace ourselves for a fusillade of deliberate double-faults, a tsunami of comically inept passing shots, a flood of fatuously over-pitched lobs and over-enthusiastic smashes? (And if the officials have been bribed as well, shall we see an umpire confidently declaring a ball "out" when it's six inches inside the baseline, a state of affairs about which the stroke player is happy, being in receipt of a bribe?)

John Walsh: btw

Saturday, 21 June 2008

Local politics doesn't inspire terribly strong emotions, does it? Last week's mayoral elections in the tiny farming village of Pilsbury, North Dakota (population: 11) were considered a bit of a fiasco when no one at all turned up to vote, not even the candidates. "Everybody has a job and they are busy," explained the current mayor, Darrel Brudevold, "It just worked out that nobody seemed to go to the polls." Meanwhile, in the Romanian town of Voinesti, residents re-elected the popular Neculai Ivascu, 57, as their mayor, despite the fact he died of liver failure just after voting began. So unpopular was his opponent that Neculai still won by a margin of 23 votes. "I know he died but I don't want change," one supporter told Romanian television. Now that's what I call conservatism.

John Walsh: Tales of the City

Tuesday, 10 June 2008

Let me tell you about this girl I know. She was only a kid when I first met her. Her parents lived down the road from us in Camberwell: Nick was in advertising, Evelyn was an academic, and their daughter Flo was a coltish child with straggly brown hair, a determined chin and a curious trick of narrowing her eyes when she looked around the room.

John Walsh: btw

Saturday, 7 June 2008

Could we stop saying "inappropriate" when we mean "wrong"? Ever since Bill Clinton used the prissy circumlocution about his affair with Ms Lewinsky in 1999, it's taken over the world. People no longer say or do terrible things – just "inappropriate" things. Mariella Frostrup, in her Sunday agony column, advised a battered wife that, next time her husband whacked her, she should tell him: "This is unacceptable and inappropriate" – as if he was guilty of breaking some subtle code of conduct, rather than being a prize bastard. Now teachers at a school in Worthing, West Sussex, have banned pupils from drinking Red Bull because, they say: "We found that a small number of children's behaviour was less appropriate after they been drinking these drinks." Less appropriate? You mean it was worse.

Advertiser Links