The Debatable Land

Culture can be turned up to 11...

I've a wee piece at the new webzine Culture11, which launches today, looking at sports that might profitably be brought back into the Olympic fold in times for London 2012. Also well worth checking out: Rod Dreher's article on keeping chickens in Dallas...

Department of Appalling Self-Promotion

Iain Dale wants you to vote for your favourite political blogs (written by Britons or furriners resident in the United Kingdom). Obviously this means you can vote for this one. All you need to do is go here or (better) email Iain here and leave your list of ten blogs in the comments section. What could be simpler than that? And if you felt like mentioning this one somewhere in the upper echelons of your list, well, that would be dandy...

Coming of Age

Er, I'm the subject of this week's Normblog profile. It's here.

Department of self-promotion

You want to know more about the state of the sports memorabilia market? Of course you do. From my piece in this week's Spectator:

As was so often the case, P.G. Wodehouse reached deep into the heart of the matter: collecting sporting memorabilia requires dedication, a willingness to speculate, a tolerance of risk and, too often, a certain amount of the ‘iron in the soul’ that equips a man to survive uxorial disapproval.

Readers will recall the sorry tale, related in ‘High Stakes’, of how the American millionaires Bradbury Fisher and Gladstone Bott risked butlers, railroads and their wives’ wrath to secure ownership of ‘the authentic baffy used by Bobby Jones in his first important contest — the Infants’ All-In Championship of Atlanta, Georgia, open to those of both sexes not yet having finished teething’.

Wodehouse was right, however: the novice collector is well advised to buy early and hold.

Whole thing here.