Column by David in The Times.

AT THE MOMENT, I CAN’T DECIDE whether or not to read Sophie’s Choice. I’ve never seen the film. I’ve always found the idea of the choice too harrowing, too awful, to watch it being enacted. But I think I can cope with it in a book. This isn’t to suggest that books are less emotionally involving than films; but the quality of emotional involvement they provide is, I think, subtler, less acute, and therefore less traumatic. One doesn’t have to cope with the actual sight of a screaming child receding on a train: just prose describing it, the impact of which is easier to deflect, or at least, control.

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Column by David in The Times.

IF YOU’RE LOOKING for consolation as Euro 2008 begins today, consider the space that Waterstones will now have to give over to proper books in lieu of all the football autobiographies shelved in the wake of England’s failure to qualify. Think of the titles that may now remain for ever unpublished: Born Slippy by John Terry; No One Seems to Have Realised That With a Name Like This I Must Be Welsh by Gareth Barry; Yes, the Circus Knows I’m Here by Peter Crouch; A Squirrel With Alopecia by Steve McClaren’s hair; etc.

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Column by David in Esquire.

I occasionally glanced at something mildly erotic on the web. But now, more and more, I look at property websites. Jesus.

So the other day I got hold of some Wigmore. Wigmore, as you will of course be aware, is a cheese, referred to in The Complete Encyclopedia of Cheese (a book that lives – some would say incongruously; I say smelly is as smelly does – in my toilet) as “A modern farmhouse cheese from Berkshire… the curd is firm and fatty and almost sweet, with notes of caramel, nuts and lamb fat.” Now, before you become concerned, I’m not going to start proclaiming, as I believe some Sunday supplements have done in response to ex-Blur bassist and general rock star aristo layabout Alex James producing his own Cotswold variety, that “Cheese is the new rock’n’roll.”

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