Lovely bit of writing, there Robert. Thank you.

I'd been in the mountains of Sri Lanka for 10 days, visiting old colonial hill stations. It's a very poor area, and for that time I ate only boiled eggs, boiled white rice and very strong beer, as the Sri Lankans keep the old Victorian breweries going with the original brews, and your colonial lads enjoyed an 8.5 ABV…

The nearest equivalent would be an English muffin, something you actually rarely see in the UK.

+ 100w bedside lights. Has anyone else noticed that 4* + hotels apparently don't really like you sitting in a room reading when you could be down in the bar spending 8 quid on a beer instead?

There's loads of bands like that. About half of the UK Magazine, 'Classic Rock' is about new bands who spend their down time bidding for denim loons and fringed suede weskits on Ebay

Companies now have to have made-up words as their names. It's so you can find them on the internet.

One of the primary ingredients of the original Fanta was wood pulp, I believe. They loved their pop, the Nazis.

The Nazis were well-read on the early treatises on marketing and advertising that started coming out of the US in the 1920s. They chose the swastika cause it was a cool-looking logo that was easy to reproduce in any format - German typewriters had swastika keys in that era. Same with the uniforms designed by Hugo…

You have to remember that there's a lot of middle aged guys with a few quid spare who don't really like music any more, but sincerely believe they do, so they become connoisseurs rather than listeners. It used to be just The Beatles and classic rock, but it was going to happen with rap eventually. Public Enemy, who…

Which I reckon is probably why there'll never be a Smiths reunion now. Moz has aged in that particular Northern way that pub blokes do, and Marr is still elfin. Visually, it's going to be embarassing. And yes, I reckon Moz probably does get on the internet to post dumb shit when he's had a gallon, as you do.

Nope, he does electronic indie film soundtracks on the reg. It's often forgotten that he started off as a tape splicing Cabaret Voltaire/Throbbing Gristle type, and he's gone back to that.

At first, I thought they were all the names of imaginary pilot shows, not whatever it is they are.

The Daily Mail's monthly article on Banksy's secret identity is merely to engender the inevitable 1000+ BTL comments from demented halfwits along the lines of 'That's not art, that's vandalism, however I wouldn't mind if he'd come along and do one one my already very desirable detached home in a desirable area of…

Any top ten of punk albums printed in a UK music magazine, (and they all do that about twice a year on average) it's in there. It's not considered remotely obscure here.

But a big part of the appeal of pop is about self-projection, seeing yourself in that role. It's less appealing if you're made aware you have to work your bollocks off and also be talented to get there. That's why TV talent shows both stress the 'follow your dreams' angle of the process, rather than the hard-worky…

Yep, in the film the characters don't really seem to have much of a reason to go feral. Ballard's books often took a very obvious metaphor, and then took it to a ridiculous extreme, - and the film doesn't really manage to do that convincingly. There's also the thing, for me, that Ballard's books as much a criticism…

If you're young and arty, , and from any European country in the latitudes between Germany and Finland, existential despair is your default setting. It's not era specific.

And as no man in the show has spent any money whatsoever in the last ten years on clothes, furniture, or cultivating a respectable adult drinking habit, they must have a few bob stashed away however little they're apparently paid. You can't spend that much on comics, board games and eating at chain restaurants.

Plus the idea that Raj, when he was first introduced, was portrayed as a naive, colonial Mummy's boy and thus still in his cliched Bangladesh chic of zippered cardigans and 70s shirts. Now he's supposedly a metrosexual bi-curious part-time party planner with a rare dog and a hot chick, but the cardigans are still…

And, whilst you might not have changed your look much between the ages of 25 and 35, or however old their supposed to be, you probably bought some new clothes, or had a different haircut, or bought some new scatter cushions for the sofa, or threw your college textbooks out. SOMETHING, anyway. The way that the all of…