mostly david ephgrave

A cat is a useful pet to have when your home has insufficient heating.  They act as a living, buzzing hot water bottle, if that isn't too terrifying a concept. You can even trick yourself into thinking that their sitting on your lap is a display of affection, rather than a ruthless bid to rob you of your warmth. If you died of hypothermia, they'd find another, bleaker use for you; "It's the circle of life," as Tim Rice would put it (and he always bloody does).  I got up early this morning, after having laid awake for what seemed an eternity, unable to sleep. Within minutes, my cat had led me to the kitchen to show me where her food was kept; she's good like that. She then sat  on me for hours, while my storage heating system did its inept, puffy, stuffy, airblowy-yet-not-actually-warming-you- up thing. My flat was built in the late-1970s. I blame Thatcher for i t . S he probably laid the cornerstone ; the coi ffured , pogonpho bic bint.

If television programmes are to be believed, the Seventies were brown . As I was born in 1981, I'm unable to comment on this theory first-hand. Whilst being a couple of years shy of the opportunity to offer an eyewitness account, I’ve certainly seen a lot of secondary evidence.   A nything that wasn’t brown was a brownish-grey or orange. Take Columbo, for instance. I’m a big fan of the dishevelled detective, owning the complete series as a DVD box-set. There are two things I’ve learnt since watching so many episodes back-to-back: that instances of homicide in 1970s' Los Angeles were alarmingly high – and that most were committed to a sepia backdrop. It’s as if they’d decided to work to a very specific colour-scheme: nothing darker than Peter Falk’s cigar; nothing lighter than his raincoat.   If only the perpetrators had stuck to this formula with more rigidity, they could have got away with murder. A young David ...