All reviews

Crockett & Jones Islay Dark Brown Scotch Country Grain - 1 Year Later

A Review in Fashion - 28/09/2024

"One boot to rule them all, and in the dark, bind them. My feet that is. Painfully."
6
Let me state for the record, I absolutely did not spend £625 on a pair of goddamn boots. I got these at the Crockett & Jones factory in Northampton where they also sell their seconds—shoes that aren't deemed 100% perfect and are sold at a big discount. I think I got these for £250, which is still insane, but the defect in this pair was an almost imperceptible scratch on the toebox. Whenever I visit my parents in the Northamptonshire countryside, I grit my teeth to resist the urge to wander ...
Tineco FLOOR ONE S5 Extreme

A Review in Technology - 15/09/2024

"Once in place, the happy robot voice told me to start the self-cleaning mode. I thought, Why don’t you do it yourself? I couldn’t help but wonder how it’s smart enough to auto-detect suction and water levels at any given time, and even alert me when the tanks are full or empty, yet it can’t figure out when it needs a self-clean."
8
It's Sunday, the day when my partner and I are both home at the same time and the chosen day to clean our apartment only for us to work for the rest of the week, hardly be in it, and still have it turn into a mess. I'm stood there with an almost 10-year-old Dyson V8, with a replaced head and battery, kicking around a bucket and mop combo from room to room thinking to myself, I can send a picture of my ballbag to an AI and have it examine them for any abnormalities or write a sonnet about it, ...
Konditorei Kormuth - Bratislava

A Review in Cuisine - 07/06/2024

"Before I even had a chance to register what on planet Earth was going on, we were explained that there was a €13 minimum spend per head as if it was a backstreet all-you-can-eat shitbox."
3
Aligned with the over-priced tourist junk shops and the themed pubs about the ankle-cracking cobbled streets of Bratislava's beautiful Old Town, sat another tourist trap bedecked with old-timey portraits of what I'm assuming are of people who never existed, stained glass windows, and regally painted flourishes adoring every free space possible: the Konditorei Kormuth café. Perpetually swarmed with people leering through the window to marvel at the migraine-inducing interior and touted as a "...
Bisto - Curry Sauce Mix

A Review in Cuisine - 25/05/2024

"This Bisto curry sauce was like a corrupted memory of actual curry sauce"
2
Here, in my little dusty nook of this new and instantaneous world in a universe brimming with videos on demand, lightning-fast data access via the information superhighway, and instant copy-and-paste face upgrades, there has always been a sacred pocket of simplicity that only poked at the rapid future we steamrolled into - a time where only food preparation was instant. Coffee had been dried and crumbled down to a pitiful jar of mud-looking granules and sold as a convenience, gravy that would...
Nothing Phone (2) - Six month review

A Review in Technology - 05/03/2024

"Here comes Nothing"
9
I've never been one to spend money and resources on buying the latest and greatest phone year after year with the only actual noticeable difference being the +1 they add to the model name, and I've never understood people queueing outside the Apple Store to get their device with 1000 million megapixel cameras and 400TB of RAM to just take pictures of themselves with their balls out in front of a dirty mirror. Guess I'm getting old... Anyway, I've rocked hand-me-down phones (iPhones and then ...
Riverford - Organic Mince Pies (Authentic Bread Company)

A Review in Cuisine - 15/12/2023

"I could feel my day slipping away from me like the £6.25 I had spent on this box of dropped-looking turds"
2
Out of care for the earth and sheer laziness, I've been buying from Riverford Farms; an organic 'you get what we grow' seasonal-type fruit and veg box, and as the festive season began its boisterous entrance, Riverford announced they were selling mince pies that piqued my Christmas curiosity and got my taste buds ring ting tingling, too. It arrived in a simple box which visually spoke 'organic', 'good for the earth', and 'because of the other two points, I'm mightily expensive'. Flipping tha...
Tesco's 6 Merry Mince Pies

A Review in Cuisine - 04/12/2023

"The filling felt like the taste equivalent of an asterix at the end of a word; easily unnoticed"
2
For me, the Christmas season only starts when I procure boxes of mass-produced mince pies and eat myself into sheer insensibility, and right off the rip, this is a bad way to invite festive cheer into my life. Like every year, Tesco has a selection of mince pies going from the standard "Tesco Value" mince pies, up to the snooty Tesco's Finest range. I set aside my life of pure luxury in the name of festive science with the cheapest box available and upon employing an exiting walk like Scroog...
Crackd - The No-Egg Egg

A Review in Cuisine - 27/07/2023

"Perfect for scrambled egg stock photography"
1
I'm not usually influenced by anything, but as soon as I read a book or watch a cartoon about space, I suddenly and desperately want to become a space cowboy. What's better than turning your back on some small and easily resolved issue, then hopping into your spaceboat and sailing off to the other end of the galaxy? Certainly not the food you'd be eating on the way. Crackd - The No-Egg Egg most likely won't be the de facto egg substitute of future space rangers, because it sure-as-balls isn't...
Asteroid City (2023)

A Review in Film - 02/07/2023

"If you thought this movie was anything deeper than a small puddle, then I have a bridge to sell you"
2
Wes Anderson's newest pastel palette attack film, 'Asteroid City', has finally been released to the delight of self-adulating film auteurs. Teeming with Anderson's actor mainstays and introducing fresh faces who deliver lines with the same rapid, deadpan expressions, 'Asteroid City' treads the familiar path of Anderson's previous movie, 'The French Dispatch', by being worse than his last and exceeds it by being more Wes Anderson than ever. The film chronicles a televised production of a play...
Meatless Farm - Chickenless Roast

A Review in Cuisine - 14/02/2023

"It just tasted of, according to my notes at the time, 'eating the wrong air', which I can only unfold to be that it felt like something was really not right"
1
£4.50 Tesco Supermarket Like the cliché scene from a zombie film where the protagonist is forced into an infected-filled mega-mart to get supplies, I found myself sidestepping mindless patrons at my local Tesco for an avocado, and whilst soon looking for a place of respite to catch my breath and steel my fraying nerves, I found a quiet sanctuary. A seemingly unvisited and unloved place at the end of one of the supermarket's long and droning aisles, bereft of the hordes rushing the frozen piz...