I stumbled upon a book recently which I simply had to buy for the sheer inventiveness of the images inside it. Mixing sharp humour with a delicious edge of melancholy, ‘Little people in the city’ brings together the collected photographs of Slinkachu, a street artist who for several years has been leaving little people in the bustling city to fend for themselves, waiting to be discovered.

Flicking through the pages of this book is like discovering a whole new miniature world around us… think Land Of The Giants meets the Borrowers in the modern world. As you see page after page of these miniature statues going about their daily lives, whitewashing graffiti and moving into new homes… you really do get the sense that there could actually be miniature people living amongst us.

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I like words. They happify me. In fact, they make me tripudiate with joy. I’m one of those people who take far more pleasure in hearing about a crepuscular splodge than actually seeing one; and would much rather read about a spelunking scrimshanker than go and cheer him on. I get a kick out of the English language and, at the risk of being philodoxical, I think everybody should. Language may be fundamentally a means of communication, in the way that food is fundamentally a means of nutrition, but both offer pleasure far beyond their function. Words should be savoured like a sumptuous steak.

Of course, when I try to convince my chums about the myriad delights of mellifluous language, they call me a ponce. Well, until a few weeks back. All of a sudden, they’re casually dropping obscure words into every conversation. It’s frippet this and proprioception that. And while I love to think it’s down to my strategic nagging, I’m afraid it isn’t. They still think I’m a ponce. But they’ve become huge fans of this website called Wordle. Read more…