In which Jay Rayner confesses to being middle-aged.

Always an early riser, Andrew has spent hours this morning counting his column inches over and over again and feeling rather self-satisfied at the result.

London theatre critics take a panning

Many thanks to Would-Be Whinger M/N for drawing our attention to AA Gill’s article in today’s Sunday Times which lays into theatre critics accusing them of being dull, witless and irrelevant to real theatre-goers.

The biggest surprise of the entire experience was finding out that M/N buys a newspaper but it turns out he is forced to kill time at the weekends as he only has access to Facebook at work. Anyway…

Review – Betrayal at the Donmar

The Whingers frequently feel betrayed.

Not by each other particularly – although since one isolated incident in 1987 Phil regularly shakes out the rancid detritus of Andrew’s man-bag to cross-check the prices on the ticket stubs against the money he has just handed him.

Two dead white males respond to Mr Hytner

Quite what Mr Hytner (who didn’t come to our party) expected to achieve with his night of the long butterknives, we don’t know. But if he was expecting the dailies to summarily dump their dead white male reviewers and replace them with one-legged, black, working class lesbians from the north of England he is presumably somewhat disappointed.

Fight! Fight! Hytner takes on the critics

Hytner lays into the critics and De Jongh fights back. The knives are out.