Tim Dowling
Tim Dowling works from London. Guardian columnist, sad sack. Author of Dad You Suck (4th Estate). Police Dog Hogan's banjo player. Tim Dowling has over 31680 followers on Twitter.
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/ 23 April 2008

What stiff upper lip?

When she appeared in a New York court on Monday, author JK Rowling invoked a time-honoured, if largely mythical, notion of British reserve. ”I really don’t want to cry,” she said, ”because I’m British.” In this one utterance she managed to honour and breach the custom simultaneously. The whole point of the stiff upper lip is that you’re not supposed to let on that you even feel like crying. In fact, Rowling has a history of tearfulness.

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/ 28 June 2006

Are we getting angrier?

We all get angry sometimes. Some of us, no doubt, are angry right now. Some of us are angry for wholly legitimate reasons to do with a computer that has been temporarily inhabited by evil spirits, and some of us are just being irrational. And some of us, it seems, have anger as a disease.

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/ 22 November 2005

My life as a penguin

Torquay, on the south coast of England (and a prime British holiday resort), is surely one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. Not if you’re a penguin, though. For the black and white inhabitants of Living Coasts, Torquay’s harbourside zoo, the term "English riviera" holds no bleak tinge of irony even during the so-called "shoulder season".