Oh dear. Back in the day, a roguish campaign to rib your headteacher might have consisted of a home-made comic strip passed around during maths or some naughty graffiti in the bike sheds. These days, offensive slurs can be carefully placed on MySpace, beaming out your libellious, text-speak rant to the world wide community. Such is life for Muswell Hill headteacher Aydin Onac, who is the victim of a somewhat tasteless online crack, depicting......

Rats have taken over Muswell Hill. And we're not just talking about the clowns from Haringey Council who dumped those confidential documents a few months back. No, these are the genuine deal, the scurrying little beggars themselves, all brown of fur and sharp of claw. Residents in N10 have spotted sewer rats (species:Rattus evillus) ambling along Dukes Avenue and the Broadway, putting fear and terror into the hearts of locals without so much as......

There are just too many good events around town this week for us to narrow our picks for certain nights. Thus we present you with multiple options and leave that difficult choice to you. In the meantime, we’ll be brushing up on our science fiction in an effort to figure out how to move quickly from event to event. The solution? Teleporting. Clearly. Monday: writLoud returns to RADA tonight. We like this event, as......

And we’re not just talking about the hills of the Chankly Bore. Londoners are being advised to batten down the hatches on Monday morning, when a rather ferocious weather front is predicted to romp across the UK. The Met Office has gotten all serious on us. After that weather forecast, they have of course been awfully careful, but this seems to be more than the normal, jovial ‘wrap-up-a-bit-warmer’ banter. And even our favourite meteorological website......

Fed up of the froth, mirth and sentimentality of the Yuletide muzak yet? To bring you an antidote and alternative soundtrack for your Christmas holidays we caught up with the utterly charming Roi Robertson of Mechanical Cabaret over a sorbet and peppermint tea and ruminated on the band's latest single, pastoral London views and the fact that we've never seen him and Noel Fielding in the same room together... Who's in the band? I......

London Street Art 2 is the sequel to, well, erm, London Street Art. The pocket sized book chronicles some of the more interesting graffiti from the past year. We asked photographer Alex MacNaughton about his latest collection of images - many, like the shot above, show street art that has since vanished. Warning: Some readers may find his comments about Flickr disturbing. There's no 'about the author' on the book, so tell us a......

Oliver and Adelaide Tambo lived in Muswell Hill for 30 years. Adelaide worked as a nurse at the Whittington Hospital and they raised 3 children in London. In 1990 they were the first recipients of the Freedom of the Borough of Haringey. Why? You may well ask. Oliver Tambo was a friend and comrade of Nelson Mandela, who worked to defend victims of apartheid. He played an unparalleled role in the growth and development......

There's a serious leak in Haringey, and the unfortunate residents have had to cope with unamusing oozings of a fecal persuasion. The shit has most inconveniently hit the fan at a local funeral stationary supplier. A trade that requires tact and delicacy isn't helped by reeking pools of effluent by the door. It makes me feel physically sick when I come up here, it smells so bad because it's raw sewage. It is a......

Themanwhofellasleep is on an outing this month - a virtual book tour in which he'll spend twenty days jumping around the blogosphere doing interviews and talking to people about his book. Thinking we'd leave the Q&A's and reviews for other legs of the trip we asked Themanwhofellasleep instead to talk a little about what's been going on in the press of late... Hello, this is Greg aka Themanwhofellasleep. You may know me from my......

Get your bids in. The ‘ailing’ Alexandra Palace is now up for grabs, and is looking for someone to take on a 125 year lease. The Grade II-listed complex sits high atop Muswell Hill and is the major landmark of the area. But like Battersea Power Station and the Dome, it’s one of the great buildings of London that misses its full potential. So who’s going to buy it? Well, restrictions stipulate that the......

2005 is going to go down as the year when the Brits won everything (as long as we gloss over the England football team): Our glorious Olympic bid, the hastily damed Ellen MacArthur, Liverpool stealing the Champions League and, of course, England’s Ashes triumph. But when Jools Holland hoots-his-nanny, or whatever it is he does on New Year’s Eve, which of our many heroes deserves most airtime? Step forward Mario Kombou. Mario, a resident......

London is being steathily taken over by clones, a report has warned. Fortunately (or perhaps not), this has nothing to do with sinister children in gasmasks or the Corrs, and a lot to do with the increasingly homogenised nature of our high streets. The report, published by the New Economics Foundation, cautions that the spread of chain stores and franchises are turning Britain into a nation of "clone towns" where locally owned shops have......