Have you looked at a washing machine recently? We’ll need a new one when we move countries, and the last one we bought was maybe in 2013 in Australia. So, at the weekend I spent an hour tentatively dipping my toe into the shopping pool to see how warm the water is, and HOLY MOLY! You can buy washing machines with AI now! I was so excited. Imagine. A washing machine that’ll wander around the house picking up washing, sorting it into piles, washing it and hanging it up for us! But when I read...
14 days ago • 1 min read
great news! In fact, great newses, because I have two! The first one will come as a relief to everyone who’s been struggling to keep up with the tsunami of nonsense on YouTube, etc. I’ve been posting five videos of nonsense (but top-notch nonsense, if I do say so myself) every week for the last six weeks for a challenge. Now that I’ve won the challenge, I’m dialling it back to three a week, in response to urgent warnings by brain specialists that humanity can’t take it much longer. In future,...
21 days ago • 1 min read
It’s the time of year I get shouted at the most. Hurray! Spring has arrived, so Tbilisi’s gardeners are filling the parks’ flowerbeds with red woodchip mulch again. Hurray! Which means they shout at me when Manchee goes over to do his business on them.* Yay! The woodchips are to combat weeds by sucking up nitrogen. (So, the reason weeds grow better than flowers is that weeds are nitro-powered, apparently.) Dogs also go mad for those woodchips. Visitors to Tbilisi in spring are often terrified...
28 days ago • 1 min read
you know what I hated while growing up? Curtains. In particular, the ones in my bedroom. They were a deadly beige with enormous brown… What are they called? Paisleys? Those swirly amoeba-blobs that make up a paisley pattern. Dreadful-looking things with swollen heads and swirls that gave them arms and legs. And because the window let in a draught – what we called “getting fresh air” in those days – the curtains swayed in and out, making it look like the paisley monsters were marching towards...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
when I visited my granny in England, people thought I was a burglar. I loved visiting my granny, but – let’s be honest here – she was a few years older than me, so occasionally things felt a little slow for a young lad full of beans on toast. One time I decided to see how many laps of the house I could do in ten minutes. She lived at the end of a row of terraced houses, so I would start in the front garden, run inside, out through the kitchen door into the back garden, then onto the bin, over...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Listen to this for an origin story: The cyberpunk himself, William Gibson, was writing a screenplay with a Kazakh director. Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, but Gibson needed to finish a novel. So he sent his friend and fellow writer, Jack Womack, to Russia to work on the screenplay in his stead. The film’s star died, and so did the film. But based on the turmoil and chaos he witnessed in Moscow – the entire communist political system disappeared overnight – Womack wrote Let’s Put...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
I’m reading sci-fi at the moment, though I probably shouldn’t. I’m Irish, and we’re not used to it. When I was growing up, we had six television channels. Four English ones, and two Irish wans. In twenty years, the only sci-fi was Red Dwarf and Doctor Who. Both on the English channels, of course. After all, we Irish only recently started believing in the present. Back in the eighties, we didn’t have roads; we had strips of potholes. Condoms were prescription-only, and six of the island’s...
2 months ago • 1 min read
My mother didn’t have it easy. She didn’t even have a sense of smell. And while the rest of 1980s Ireland had miraculous moving statues, we made do with mysterious margarine. Back in those days, butter was bad and margarine was good, so young Morgan et al. all ate margarine. Sometimes my breakfast toast tasted fine with it. Some mornings the margarine was weird. A brand new tub. Just opened the previous night. I had put it on my evening toast. My mother had put it on her evening potatoes. No...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Families are great. But a lot. If you’ve had about enough of yours, tell them this is a very important email you have to read. I’ll back you up. And it is important, as I present some crazy New Year traditions, that will make your party go with a bang! Killer List of 10 Bread-Based New Year Traditions. 1. At a party, wait until the countdown to the new year starts before throwing a bread roll over your shoulder. You might hit the person you one day marry in the face with it. 2. Villages used...
3 months ago • 2 min read
