Alistair Coleman

In 1944, when he wasn't messing about with cats in boxes, the philosopher Erwin Schroedinger wrote a book asking the eternal question: What is Life? I find in my advancing years that life is far too short to read what he might have said, but I doubt it had anything...

It must be terribly hard work being a military dictator these days, having to spend your nights with one eye open in case the down-trodden proles get ideas above their station and run amok through the streets in brazen revolution while you have to flee for your life down a...

I am not a violent man. I am tolerant of a great many things which would drive others to despair. In fact, I have been known to turn the other cheek on the sort of behaviour that would turn Gandhi into an axe-wielding homicidal maniac, or make Jesus run amok...

Nobody likes a clown.

I say this for a number of reasons, the first of which being the sight of an entire clown outfit in a hedge by the side of the road on the outskirts of the town where I work. Big ridiculous pom-pom buttons; even bigger, more ridiculous...

The Queen - a betting woman herself - has thumbed her nose at the bookies and named rank outsiders Chelmsford, Perth and a small, roped-off area in Wales called St Asaph as new cities as part of her Diamond Jubilee celebrations. In Cheltenham Festival week, anybody...

I've had a few problems with technology this week. Anybody who saw me shouting - very loudly, in the middle of Earl's Court Exhibition Centre - at a laptop which had committed the heinous crime of being temporarily unable to connect to the internet will know what I mean.

I...

Back in the days when I was a boy electrician employed by a major broadcaster, my main duty was to sit up all night and watch television coming out of the old Soviet Union, just in case something unusual might happen.

At a quarter past four o'clock of each morning,...

Call me mad, but I have a theory, and it is this: The bigger the country as a military power, I theorise, the worse its cheese and associated dairy products. Look at American cheese. Good grief, look at Russian cheese (if you can). In both cases, I'd rather eat next...

Ten years ago, I received a phone call from the newsroom of the Guardian newspaper in which I learned that they had bestowed me with the title of "Britain's Best Blogger", damning me with the praise that I was (and I quote) "better than Jeffrey Archer". My (now...

It is not often that one feels a touch of sympathy for David Cameron, but the news that he is attracting the wrath of members of his own party over a policy U-turn on Europe has struck me somewhere in the proximity of my cold, cold heart. It's...

In the wake of Michael Gove's proposal to build a new Royal Yacht for Her Majesty the Queen to mark the Diamond Jubilee comes a certain amount of chest thumping over how much the tub's going to cost us all. Taxpayer funded or not, "Why," people ask, "should...

It is one of the moments in my life of which I am least proud: The time I spectacularly failed to recognise celebrity chef and cheese-lifter Anthony Worrall Thompson.

Ushered into the presence of a small bearded man who smelled of fresh veg, I greeted him much like...

"Never go back," they say, and I should know. After all, I made the dreadful mistake of going back to a previous employer, only to find that they'd upped the security and changed the combination on the safe. Also, nobody told me about the fat sweaty copper on the security...

Following the death of Kim Jong Il, the eyes of the world fall on the rather rotund figure of his son, Kim Jong Un.

Little is known of the young man North Korean state media have dubbed 'The Supreme Leader', who will take the reins as...

I have just returned from the Post Office, where I witnessed with my own eyes a gentleman renewing the tax disc for his car whilst wearing trainers with toes on them. Trainers, with toes, looking like some sort of horrific human-reptilian hybrid.

Now, I am certain that there is...