City Skills: The best places in London to pretend you're in a film

Diving for dollars: Where there is Bill Clegg’s muck, there’s brass

Peter Davis, Ghost Bus Tours

I first noticed the distinctive routemaster “Ghost Bus” as it’s ominous black shape trundled along Northumberland Avenue on a winter evening. The Ghost Bus Tour aims to provide people with a unique view of the darker side of London by fusing history, theatre and comedy together with the aid of some creative embellishment. I tracked down Peter Davis, Creative Director of the Ghost Bus Tour in its appropriately atmospheric headquarters located in the upstairs of a shadily lit pub.
snipe: How did the idea for the tour come about?

Caffeine Nation - testing the East London disloyalty card over one day

Brainlove Festival: Väljasõit Rohelisse

How the Daily Mail uses Melanie Phillips as clickbait to lure in all you pinkos

There are days I wish Melanie Phillips would act like a proper troll and only sally forth from under the bridge to harass passing goats. But as the Daily Mail columnist you love to hate, Mel wouldn’t be doing her job if she didn’t cause a shit storm once in a while. And that’s what she’s gone and done this morning with her latest rant, ‘Yes, gays have often been the victims of prejudice. But they now risk becoming the new McCarthyites’ (you can read the snappily-titled piece here without having to visit Mail Online).

How do my wife and I tell our parents about our girlfriend?

I have a bit of a situation. I’m a 23-year-old heterosexual male, and I am married. My wife and I also happen to have a girlfriend now, making our arrangement a polyamorous triad. We all love each other very much, and we are getting to the point that we are thinking about how we are going to tell our parents about our relationship.

My parents have already been told. Their reactions were as expected: My mother was slightly bemused and amazed that I was able to pull it off, while my father gave me a high five. But my parents are divorced/remarried-to-other-people atheists, and by the time I was 12, my dad was teaching me how to eat pussy. So my situation is not exactly typical.

My wife’s family is super Southern Baptist, while our girlfriend’s mother is a big ol’ bag of crazy: She was a physically abusive nut job who beat her children with a Bible attached to a rope.

Our question is this: Should we even bother disclosing to either of their sets of Bible-beating parents? To give you an even better idea about who my mother-in-law is: I’m a recovering addict (two years sober), and after I told her that in confidence, she used it against me the first chance she got (called me a thieving junkie). She’s a hypocritical, judgmental bitch, but my wife feels like she needs her approval.
If we shouldn’t disclose, then how do we deal with things like family holidays and other group events? Is not disclosing a sign that either my wife or girlfriend is ashamed of the life we lead? Your help would be appreciated.

Not Telling The Whole Truth

Was Dr Crippen innocent? Meet the man staging a retrial who wants you to be in the jury

Africker in Hoxton and One-on-One in Battersea

There’s a classic clown exercise known as “The Chicken in the Oven”, or sometimes called “Ladies and Gentleman: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette”. The clowns tumble over each other to present the finest performance ever of the great Bard’s masterpiece- but they have never seen the play, so they desperately fake it. Meanwhile, somewhere, a chicken is roasting to a blackened crisp and they keep popping off and on to keep an eye on it, probably watching it burn, because they’ve never cooked a chicken before either. Frankly, they haven’t a clue, but the last thing they want is for you to suspect anything is wrong.

Internet Forever

Internet Forever have always been a strange and wonderful band.

They started as a duo: a talented, super-niche solo artist and scene-star with pop aspirations called Laura Wolf, and Heartbeeps, aka Craig Nunn, a lo-fi musician and photographer with a knack for eye-catching imagery and ear-catching songs. Their first demo of “Break Bones” illustrated both a striking capacity for pop songwriting, and a sensibility that redefined the lower limits of lo-fi. It swept the blogsphere like wildfire, right up the the heady heights of Pitchfork. “That version of Break Bones was all we could manage with our mad skills at the time,” says Craig. “It’s not like we were intentionally part of a lo-fi scene. I think we were always destined to make a straight-up pop record.”