When I was a kid I lived for a while next to a church. We lived in this ramshackle old house with a massive garden and I used to spend a lot of time kicking or throwing or hitting balls around with my friend Sam from next door. Sam was Dutch. I have no idea […]

I was recently barraged with a biblical flood of emails asking me if my company wanted to be on the Inc 500 list for Europe’s fastest growing companies. The first few I ignored, because I don’t have a company, and even if I did have a company it certainly wouldn’t be one of the fastest growing […]

When I was growing up, my dad and both of my grandparents used to tell me that being unable to get up on time was “laziness, pure and simple”. For a while I believed them, and added it to the growing list of faults that I knew I realistically wouldn’t ever fix. But as I have […]

I recently moved into a new place. Because I no longer live in London I can afford to live in something larger than a shoebox and I can even afford to buy furniture of my own, as opposed to living amongst the accumulated spooge of the thousands of Londoners that have gone before. So I ordered some mass-produced individuality from IKEA.

There’s no photography allowed in the casinos of Las Vegas. Some claim it’s to retain a sense of mystique, while other people might suggest it’s because it might undercut the carefully curated media depiction of it. I passed through there for three days a few years ago on my way out of LA and I was immediately […]

I remember when we first went to see you at your mum’s place. Your real mum’s place, that is. All the other puppies had been chosen, apart from you. Even the runt of the litter. It felt at the time like you knew that, and you were a bit insecure about it. You were stood […]

Paying tax can be a taxing affair. It proved too difficult for pretty much every single high-net-worth individual and company in 2014, so why should anyone? Call me the British Che Guevara, a modern day Robin Hood, a Spartacus for the post-industrial age – I decided I couldn’t sit idly by and let HSBC get away with (effectively) […]

Something that’s all over the news at the moment is this. Wonga, a British payday loans lender, which is also the worst company in the world and one of the main antagonists in a recent book called Can Companies Sin? has had to write off substantial fees to people who’ve defaulted on loans they should never have had access […]

The Netherlands is my favourite country and I’ll probably end up living there in the future if it somehow manages to stay above sea level. I’m also very into football and have the misfortune of being English. So I asked the embassy if I could be a Dutch citizen every time there’s a major football […]

In the good old days before you could wear things on your face that can read your emails, people would exchange stories and songs around campfires. Nowadays people like me just talk endlessly about the football in soulless chain restaurants. My soulless chain restaurant of choice is Nando’s because it somehow always hits the spot, […]