Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Decide for yourself

    Decide for yourself

    There are stories and there are libraries. Libraries are not only repositories of completed stories, but the raw material from which stories are constructed, the sets of possibilities, arranged spatially, that are sometimes placed into sequence to form narratives. This dichotomy, between the settled order of a story as told and the branching web of… Read more

  • Pale glimmerings of ambiguity

    Pale glimmerings of ambiguity

    Singer-songwriter albums often foreground the songs, to the extent that there is more or less nothing to distinguish the way they are performed or recorded from any other singer-songwriter album. Some appropriate, accomplished guitar work, some appropriate, accomplished vocals, some lyrics, and some melodies. When the writing itself reproduces established conventions around melodic narrative and… Read more

  • A hangover cure in the form of a building

    A hangover cure in the form of a building

    Comfort comes in nostalgia-sized portions, and for the eponymous ‘Mum’ that nostalgia is focussed on the 1970s. This is evident in the decor at Mum’s Great Comfort Food in Edinburgh, in the period TV quotes on the menus, rendered in appropriate typefaces, and to some extent in the menu, although it is probably more characterised… Read more

  • A life lived in the kitchen

    A life lived in the kitchen

    I don’t come from anywhere in particular. I’m a Turkish jew with an Italian name on my father’s side, and I’m a characteristically rootless kind of middle-class English on my mother’s, with bits of Norfolk, West-Country, Kent, Wales and whatever-else in the family histories that precede my arrival in a London hospital in nineteen-seventy. But… Read more

  • Slightly scuffed culinary theatre

    Slightly scuffed culinary theatre

    I know about as much about Japanese food as you can find out about Italian food by eating in Pizza Hut. I have eaten sushi, sometimes ostentatiously Japanese in its immediate preparation, but consistently of a character that will be familiar to British consumers. I have eaten noodle soups described as ‘ramen’, but always in… Read more

  • Virtue and privilege

    Virtue and privilege

    Taking in a sampling of the Edinburgh Fringe in the company of a student at Edinburgh University affords a novel perspective. This is our first time at the Fringe since Spawn began studying there, and there is a subtle difference between seeing shows in some of the interesting spaces that happen to exist in the… Read more