HeyJaredCulture Café
Making sense of our big, bad, beautiful world. Society, politics, life, books, art, crisps.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 24, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 11, 2026
Latest issues
What Seven Up! taught me about a human life (opens the original)
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Tony wanted to be a jockey. Neil wanted to be an astronaut. Paul was worried about getting married because he thought his future wife might force him to eat “greens”.These children touched the heart of a nation when they first spoke so openly about their hopes and dreams. They were filmed in their school uniforms, in black and white. They went, with more than ten other children, on a trip to Regent’s Park Zoo. The zoo looked very different to how it looks now. But then England looked different t
Nobody Wants This (opens the original)
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Take a scenario like this.You get back to London after a (largely) lovely summer away. After an awful lot of domestic work in extremely high temperatures, you’re quite excited by the prospect of grey skies and some brain-related graft. You take a few days to clear the decks: deleting about a million emails, gathering piles of receipts to send your accountant and printing out invoices, because you haven’t quite got the hang of the “online portal”, which is meant to make life easier but doesn’t.<d
My Flawed Paradiso (opens the original)
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Hello! How are you? I hope you had a lovely summer.I’m back in London after nearly two months away and back on Substack after nearly one month off it.Culture Café is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.<div class="fake
It's 40 degrees and the septic tank has given up! (opens the original)
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It’s hot. Extremely hot. Our septic tank is still broken and leaking. Our garden, which is currently just earth, veers between the Sahara and the Somme. When it’s the Somme, it slides down the hillside onto our brand-new terrace. We have been shovelling it off, in 38 degrees.Welcome to Umbria, in summer 2026! The green heart of Italy, which is currently not so green. When we first came here, six years ago, the neighbours told us that the temperature in summer rarely went above thirty. Since we a
The storm, the symphony and the septic tank (opens the original)
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Well, it has been quite the week. Sure, we have a new prime minister and a new chancellor and a new foreign secretary and a (largely) new cabinet. We have a lot of talk about “circuit breaks” and “breathing space”.But I’m not talking about that. What I’m talking about is the highs, lows, twists, turns, pipes and gutters on our Umbrian hill.Culture Café is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free
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