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Writing
Late Summer, 2020: A Personal Compendium
I have shingles at the moment. I remember at various points in my life people talking in a tone of great pity and sympathy about other people who had shingles but I don’t think I’d ever properly considered what it was. Now I know. What happens is a
Writing
Brief Encounter: Bruce Lacey And His Robot Friends (2012)
This is Rosa Bosom,’ said Bruce Lacey, showing me into the living room of his chilly, cluttered Norfolk farmhouse and pointing towards a seven-foot robot with a tailor’s dummy arms, a chest full of wires and large red lips. ‘Her name stands for Radio Operated Simulated Actress Battery
Writing
Water
My house flooded this month. Twice. First, water seeped through the back wall of the living room, turning the floorboards black. Next, it poured through the kitchen ceiling from the bathroom. It was hard to tell at first if the two floods were related, and, though now it seems more
Writing
Brief Encounter: Ronald Blythe (2009)
I walked down soft lanes past the cars of my youth, abandoned in orchards and green lanes, to the house of the writer Ronald Blythe and his cat, Kitty. It was a very old house, with bendy walls. Ronald’s coffee was head-meltingly strong and as we drank it
Writing
14 Thoughts About Writing
It’s twenty years since I began writing my first book. I had the title for it, Nice Jumper, long before I’d fully worked out what the book was going to be. Like most of my books, it’s about the thing it’s about (golf) but also not
Writing
VILLAGER
I’m writing a novel. My first. It was twenty years ago this month that I took a pen and a notebook up to a hillside in the south of England and decided I was going to write a novel and that doing so was more important to me than
Writing
Small Aspects Of The Lives Of Dogs
PICKLE AND CLIVE When I ponder the question “Who is the best dog you have ever met?” there can only be one answer, and that is Clive. Clive was the best dog I have ever met and when I say this, I say it as a dog myself, so you
Writing
Midsummer, 2020: A Personal Compendium
I was walking along the clifftop footpath last month and there were a few cows blocking my way, eleven or maybe thirteen at most. I gauged the situation - which experience has made me better at doing, where cows are concerned - and concluded they didn’t want any trouble, so pressed
Writing
Moss
The wind was up, but it wasn’t the kind of wind that sunk its teeth into you, or was liable to blow even a lightweight person off a precipice, just a wind with a very loud voice, so I went up to the high bit of the moor to
Writing
The Wall
Have you ever had a dream where it turned out that a place which had seemed exotic and alien to your normal environment was actually not very far away, as you once thought, but extremely close, or geographically connected in some secret unexpected way to where you were? California, contrary
Writing
Spring, 2020: A Personal Compendium
I have ploughed through a large number of audiobooks in the last half decade, but I’ve probably abandoned as many, sometimes because I haven’t got on with the book itself, but usually due to the narrator. A bad narrator can murder an audiobook in its sleep. Just occasionally,