The Hairball Review

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  • A Ranking of Sunbeams, Ordered by Moral Worth

    The 4 p.m. beam on the rug is competent but overrated, much like the 4 p.m. nap it facilitates. The 9 a.m. kitchen beam is a respectable middle class option with good heat and a faint smell of toast. Ranking fourth: the beam through the bathroom skylight, an eccentric choice, damp, adored by the type of reader who writes to us about fonts.

    The best sunbeam in the city, and I will not be argued out of this, falls at 1:40 p.m. on the landing of 22 Dace Street for roughly eleven minutes in late July. It is warm in the way a good argument is warm. I have measured it with a thermometer I borrowed. I have not returned it.

  • Letters: On Our Remarks About Tuna

    Following last month’s review of the Tuna Counter at Marlowe’s Fish Hall, we received 212 letters, 211 of which were the same letter. The lone original came from a Mr. Hector Dunmow, who asks whether it is “fair” to call a tin of tuna “a flat pink sermon.” It is. I stand by it and I stand by the sermon.

    Mrs. Imelda Vane of Grove Street wonders why we did not mention the water chestnuts. The answer is that there were none, and there is no use mentioning an absence unless you are paid by the word, which we are not, because we are not paid. A reader signing off as “Gravy Enthusiast” asks if the editor sleeps. He does, mostly on the letters.

  • Kibble, Blind: Nine Brands, One Ruined Afternoon

    In the interest of rigour, the Review’s tasting panel sat blindfolded before nine anonymous saucers. The panel consisted of me, our intern Pip, and a visiting Maine Coon named Duchess Anselm, who ate everything and offered no notes. Pip, who is nineteen weeks old, rated every sample “fine,” which is why Pip will not be reviewing again.

    My own findings: sample three was the product of a defeated factory. Sample six, later revealed as Highland Gulp at $31.99 for a four pound bag, had notes of salmon and mild regret. Sample eight tasted precisely like sample two, an indictment of both. The winner, by a margin I will not disclose out of spite, was the one I had refused to smell.

  • The Windowsill Is the Only Gallery That Matters

    Forget the municipal galleries, with their velvet ropes and their children. The finest permanent exhibition in this city is the sill of the east facing window at 14 Pilchard Close, where a rotating programme of pigeons, one bus and a man named Gerald appears daily from 7 a.m. The curation is flawless. Nothing is explained. Everything is behind glass.

    I spent four hours there on Saturday and witnessed a sparrow commit what I can only call a gesture. It landed. It looked at me. It left. I have not been so moved since the 2023 retrospective of the dropped sock. Admission is free, though I did pay in dignity, having chattered at the glass like a common amateur.

  • The Cardboard Box: A Retrospective, With Corrections

    Critics are fond of saying that a box is merely a box. Critics who say this have never sat in one. The Medium Parcel, introduced to our household in 2019 and curated since by Mrs. Tibbs of the second floor, remains the finest example of the enclosed seating form. Its walls are corrugated, which is to say textured, which is to say confident. Its flaps are open, which is to say the work asks something of you.

    I must, however, correct our earlier claim that the box is “perfectly sized for any cat.” It is perfectly sized for exactly one cat, and he knows who he is. My own fit, measured on 3 July, was a deplorable 94 percent, with the tail left as an afterthought in the hall.

  • Saucer: A Bowl, Reimagined, and Not for the Better

    I arrived at Saucer, the new establishment on Radiator Row, at a quarter past noon and was seated at a table I can only describe as aggressively low. The tasting menu is eleven bowls of what the chef, Fenwick Plumtree, calls “deconstructed kibble.” This is kibble, placed in separate piles. One pile per flavour note. I counted forty one pieces in the Chicken Memory course and I did not feel remembered.

    That said, the water is served in a ceramic vessel of genuine integrity, and the maître d’, a tortoiseshell named Odalys, has a way of ignoring you that feels almost architectural. Two and a half paws out of four. The bill was $86, and I was not asked how everything was, which is how I knew it was serious.