The Culture Vulture

We live in a country where shooting guns is considered uncommon, unless you are the estates gamekeeper, in the army or a criminal intent on blagging a bookies or a bank with…

We’ve come to see the Terracotta Warriors in Liverpool. This is not an Asian invasion, nor is it a takeover of armed foreign immigrants like the Daily Fail would have you believe,…

You read that right, Prague has a sex machines museum. How nice of Prague to name a museum after me, sex machine is my middle name. The saucy shenanigans and coitus contraptions…

It’s fair to say that if you don’t know your Klingons from your Quarks then the Star Trek Exhibition in Blackpool is not for you. If however you like star trekking across…

Being a bit of an old fossil myself, I find nothing more interesting than looking at other old fossils so I’m at Wollaton Hall (yes, Bruce Wayne’s house in Batman) to see some…

Weird things in jars. That’s how best to describe the Grant Museum of Zoology. Not for the squeamish, this offbeat museum in London is one of the oldest natural history museums in…

I’m feeling a dummy at Madame Tussauds, the place is an utter freak show. I’m not talking about the waxworks inside, or the queue outside of thousand of thronging visitors lined up…

Han Solo can apparently fly successfully through an asteroid field at odds of 3,720 to 1. Coincidentally, that is also the same number of people visiting the Star Wars Identities exhibition and…

Geeks, you may have heard, have inherited the Earth. Not a bad thing, I’m the biggest nerd I know, and it fits nicely with my plans for my galactic conquest as guardian…

Leonardo da Vinci, polymath, sculptor, engineer, scientist, inventor, painter and artist.  The epitome of renaissance man and on display at Nottingham Castle, 10 of the finest drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci from…

Richard Wagner was a man with too much time on his hands.  Der Ring des Nibelungen or better known as Wagner’s Ring Cycle took him 26 years to complete, the very definition…

The East Midlands Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention, or EM-Con 2016 in Nottingham, is a magnet for the nerds, dorks and geeks of the East Midlands, which is clearly why I am here.…

Some people are on the pitch…they think it’s all over. It is now, it’s four! Those legendary words uttered by Kenneth Wolstenholme back in 1966 as Geoff Hurst scored the final goal…

Science fiction, once the preserve of spotty and socially awkward star trekkies has seemingly stirred my nostalgic sci-fi senses, so I set my phasers to fun and find myself attending EM-Con 2015 –…

Off to the ballet…. In an attempt to become a little more sophisticated, show Mrs Nick Cook that I am more than the cave dwelling troglodyte that she thinks I am, and…

It is often assumed that anything involving the word convention, particularly in relation to science fiction, fantasy, comic books or mythical lore will involve bearded sandal wearing dateless wonders, fanboys with bad…

Being unsophisticated and uncouth, its time to get myself some culture and get educated about the local area visiting the DH Lawrence birthplace, Durban House heritage centre and Beauvale Priory.  We’ve lived here…