Offcuts

This is an attempt to draw together the strands of my rather incoherent journalistic and more personal output over the past 40 years. You reach an age where you hope what you have said, thought and written might start to make sense. I fear I am reaching that age. But what if it doesn’t make sense?

A brief breakdown of the sections is offered below. There is no separate section about chess, which occupies an absurd proportion of my life these days and about which I published a book in 2016. If you want to read my ramblings about the game, and to follow the fortunes of the motley crew who make up Kingston Chess Club, you can look at another website I help to oversee: kingstonchess.com

Meanwhile, here’s an explanation of the sections you will find on this website:

About
Self-explanatory. A short biog and a nice picture of me playing chess with a young Magnus Carlsen. Whatever happened to him?

Blog
Also self-explanatory. I have no idea what I will blog about. It may become a kind of therapy session.

Guardian archive
From about 2000, the Guardian – my employer for more than 30 years – became very good at logging their writers’ outpourings in chronological order on each writer’s personal profile page. Here I link to that profile, but I have also organised what I consider my more significant pieces into four genres/subject areas: interviews, features, culture and sport.

Miscellaneous pieces
Material written in the pre-internet age is much less easily accessible, so I have collected it in this section and joined it with other hard-to-find pieces written in the past two decades, plus pieces that for one reason or another (quite often myopic editors) never saw the light of day. I hope that over time I will unearth other pieces that can be added to this gallimaufry.

Books
A plug for some of the books I’ve written and which I am pleased to be associated with. There are others we can consign to oblivion.

Poems
Oh yes, I write poetry. Happily this is a very small selection of my oeuvre – the only poems I am currently willing to share.

Guardian history
In 2011 I put together an exhibition that told the story of the Guardian’s first 190 years. A neat interactive was produced for the Guardian website that preserved what I considered a rich assembly of material, but the interactive disappeared a few years later (the dangerous impermanence of the web!). No one ever told me why it was junked, and it seemed rather a loss to me. I have reconstructed the text of the 190 “moments” I chose to mark the history, and combined it with a speech I made at the opening of the exhibition and an analysis of what I saw as the five phases in the Guardian’s evolution.

Commonplaces
About 20 years ago, I started collecting aphorisms, and for some reason I now feel the need to share my collection, which I hope will be added to on a regular basis.