Yesterday, I was rushing to a meeting at 6.30pm just off Leicester Square, in London.

At 6.18pm (that exact time is on the sound recording on my iPhone) I saw a man standing in the North East corner of Leicester Square with a placard saying:

I HAVE NO MESSAGE. AND...

Ah, alcohol. It's the mainstay of hundreds and thousands of years of culture. The discovery of late Stone Age beer jugs has established the fact that purposely fermented beverages existed at least as early as 10,000 BC. It's a liquid that is used not just for celebration, but to mark...

If a woman employs the direct, masculine approach to any sort of confrontation in business, in or out of the boardroom, she is more often or not described as 'aggressive' or 'bossy'. Men are more comfortable with a woman flirting her way out of a situation than confronting them.

For decades, Covent Garden Piazza in London has had a pitch for street performers. One of the regulars there is Paolo Ferrari who also plays comedy clubs. I had a chat with him in Covent Garden yesterday afternoon.

"It's all about guts," he told me....

And so the England team has been announced, with a few surprises for those who love giving Roy Hodgson a kick up the Rs. Roy's clearly not worried by headline-writers and tweeters looking forward to "Woy at the Euwos" or bemoaning the exclusion from the squad of Nintendo Wii-O Ferdinand....

"Does it itch?"
"How about when it gets longer?"
"Does it irritate your girlfriend?"
"Do you get food stuck in it?"; are most of the questions I get asked by friends and strangers alike. They are of course referring to my beard - Not...

I was chatting to absurdist comedian Charlie Chuck this week. Or, rather, to the real person who performs as Charlie Chuck - Dave Kear. He told me he had been researching his family tree.

"I've traced it back," he told me. "Me family tree. It went back to...

Anti-terror laws, government-sponsored arms-dealers and testing the limits of free speech and protest: Mark Thomas has tackled them all.

His comedy manages to be full of conscience and political righteousness without descending into buzzkill. That's particularly impressive when dealing with material based on walking the length of Israel's...

The first crush I ever had, before Pamela Anderson, was Sergeant Debbie Callahan, from the Police Academy films. Those films also stick in my mind because of the character of Jones. Not because I also had a crush on him, but because, as a five year old, watching a man...

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...

Last week, I wrote a Huffington Post article about this year's extraordinarily heavy-handed and draconian censoring of the £400 Edinburgh Fringe Programme entries. (Performers pay almost £400 to get a meagre 40 word listing in the Fringe Programme).

You might have thought, at £10 per word,...

Why would a band of City high flyers give up properly-paid jobs to become penny-pinching home-based hacks? What drives the men who set up Britain's first artisan journalismery?

In a railway arch in east London (well it wouldn't be anywhere else in Britain, would it?), with egos rumbling everywhere and...

During a recent television interview, US President Barack Obama came out* with a bold statement regarding his views on same-sex marriage: "At a certain point I've just concluded that, for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should...

F&M are back once more to look at one of the most crucial debates being addressed right now: is The Voice better than Britain's Got Talent?

In the battles of the judges, the two shows squared up with one a-piece - while Jessie is doubtless the hottest female judge, Sivid's...

I love London. Let me be very clear about that. I love it. I always have. From childhood visits to Covent Garden, the Barbican and, the dearly missed Museum of the Moving Image, to teenage gallivants round galleries and gigs, to dodgy parties in dodgy far-flung boroughs as a young...

Now, make no mistake, I love the Edinburgh Fringe. One thing I like about it is its freewheeling, hands-off nature. Anyone can perform at the Fringe; the Fringe Office itself merely acts as a central not-really-controlling-anything hub. They charge you to put your 40 word listing and perhaps...