A Perfect Boob

It’s been a good week all round. Which is disconcerting. Weeks aren’t normally round. They start on Monday and head in a straight line through to Sunday. Then it starts all over again. Until you die.


I didn’t need any fake breasts after all. This was on Monday when I went to London for my photo shoot in the glamour palace of Bethnal Green.


“I’ve seen this nice tree,” was the first thing the photographer said to me. “Then we can go to the park. There are some really big slides.”


The park was great, enormous. I imagined myself running to the centre of it and disappearing like that character in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up. I wondered if it was shot there. Then I walked through some trees.


“The light is great.”


It is, I thought. Sunlight, what would we do without it? Then I sat on the promised slides. They really were big. Everyone has nice memories of slides but my favourite one was Aqualand, South of France, zipping down it, laughing.


There is something very Zen about having photographs taken of yourself. Perhaps that’s what all those Buddha statues are about. A statue being a more concrete representation than a flat image. Therefore more Zen.


Everyone has their favourite Buddha statue. Mine was in Japan, Daibutsu. You could walk inside him if you wanted and there was enough room to spread out a picnic blanket. That day I ate potato ice-cream and my Japanese gave me this small bottle to drink out of. It was supposed to give you special powers.


(I didn’t hold out much hope. I had had my fortune told to me in a Japanese temple - ‘You won’t die in a car crash’. Goodo!)


“You seem relaxed,” said the photographer.


Clickclickclickclickclick.


On Wednesday I received four nice emails. 1) From the BBC, the studio script for Teeth for me to check. It’s being recorded on 5th June. I also found out who’s going to read it. 2) From the editor at Gaydarnation re my interview with them. 3) The editor of Tell Tales who have accepted my story Gus. This will be published in October. 4) From my publicist at Random House to say the finished copies of Me and Mickie James are in.


My copies are in the post. So I am going to see the final finished thing. Next it will be in the shops. Then people will be able to buy it. Or not.


Now here’s the caveat. You work for years for this. Then it happens and you realise it doesn’t change your life. That crap job you are doing is still crap when you have a book published. That view of the housing estate outside your window doesn’t change.


I have decided to change my life.


Yesterday, I bought a Neil Diamond song for the first time. It’s good. But is that enough? I went to see Persepolis. It was great. I read another Albert Sanchez Pinol book, Cold Skin. This is great too, like HG Wells.


But I wish I had lived in the Enlightenment. London is destroyed in the Great Fire. I, astronomer select, give up gazing at the stars and design a new city. There will be broad boulevards, temples, no skip that, Big Buddhas. There will be potato ice-cream for everyone and water slides. Everyone will write books and read them. There will be public libraries on every corner. Music will play everywhere and everyone will get chance to be mayor even if you are a buffoon.


We will all change our jobs every two years and when bad things happen we will all pull up our socks and dig in to help. We will study all our lives and pass on our knowledge to our children. Or not if we don’t want.


And so on.

Currently reading Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine



Currently listening to Neil Diamond



Persepolis trailer

Photo Shoot

Tomorrow I am going to London to have my photo taken for Dazed and Confused magazine. In an effort to get myself in the right frame of mind I went into my local Sainsburys and perused the magazines on display.


Jordan seems to have the right look and one that the camera obviously loves. Should I get myself some enormous fake breasts? Could I do this by tomorrow morning? And where would I keep them after?


Actually I am not maintaining the right tone of gravitas. You see, in essence, this week I have decided I wanted to be a major economist.


I admire Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize winner, greatly. His new book The Trillion Dollar War looks at the opportunity cost of the Iraq war. Could three trillion dollars have been spent more wisely than on lots of weapons and blowing lots of people into small pieces? You could have bought the country lock, stock and barrel for that amount and still got change for a new bathroom he writes. It’s a winning argument.


(In a brief aside I received a letter (a physical letter although they do have my email address - they provide me with an email service) from Virgin Media. They asked me if I would like to go over to paperless billing for the saving on £1 a bill. I was straight on the phone. I wondered if they would like to go over over to paperless letters. And had they ever thought of bill-less billing? I’m all for that!)


The next book on my list of books to read is Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. This is about the economics of disaster management, i.e. the global business that have sprung up around managing disasters.


Say, for example, a former superpower engineers a war in a middle eastern country, blows it to bits. Imagine the money to be made from reconstruction! What a brilliant idea!


At the same time we live in a world seemingly incapable of pouring money into where it is really needed. Shell this week pulled out of the Thames Estuary Wind Farm project siting limited opportunities to make a really incredibly enormous pile of money for their already super-rich shareholders.


Jeffrey Sachs was on the Start the Week was talking about his new book Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. He said the money involved in making a difference would be comparatively little. America under the Bush administration has failed to build even a single carbon capture coal fired power station.


(They have spent billions of dollars going to war. See above.)


In the same period of time Kennedy decided that man would go to the moon, sent them there, and brought them back in time to see his brains get blown out because someone didn’t like what he’d done in the Bay of Pigs.


Actually that might be all wrong.


What it needs is someone to take matters into their own hands. Sometimes I feel like putting everything I own into a kit-bag, setting off to China, become a leader amongst men (think Mao with a heart), engineer a war with a former superpower, and then rebuild the world in a more sensible image.


But I probably won’t.


For a start would my orange Ikea Klippan 2 seater sofa fit in a kit-bag? And I, like Nicholson Baker, am a pacifist.


Baker has just written a book, Holy Smoke, about Hitler and the Second World War. He forwards the argument that if we had made peace with Hitler things would have been pretty bad on the continent but Jews would have been allowed to leave. America and England didn’t want this, they didn’t want more immigrants.


Baker was the same radio programme as Jeffrey Sachs who took exception to this argument.


Fight, fight, fight said Andrew Marr banging the desk with a clenched fist. It took Sarah Walker, there to talk about Chopin and his lover the French novelist George Sand’s stay on a windswept Mediterranean island to sort the whole goddam mess out.


Actually that might not have happened.





Currently reading - George Saunders, Civilwarland in Bad Decline


Currently listening to - Kula Shaker, Strangefolk

Joseph Stiglitz talks on Globalisation

Writing Courses (or not)

Thanks to everyone who’s said they are coming to the launch. It will be great to see both of you. No, really. And yes, I will have that money I owe you. Yes, and the interest. But 27%? What are you? The bastard brother of Barclaycard.


In an effort to get the blog more widely read I have decided to make it funnier. Anyone know any jokes?


No, really.


This week I have been invited to be part of a discussion on the subject of the usefulness (or not) of writing courses at an event being put on by Pulp.net at the Guardian newsroom on 21st May. Details here.


As I mentioned last week I am very busy. At the time the call came through I was asleep on the living room floor in front of the snooker. Hendry vs. O’Sullivan. One of the most exciting matches in Crucible history!


Seeing the unidentified 020 number on my mobile I was at first confused, thinking I had somehow become part of a new sex chat line. (I don’t get many calls). Then I realised that would probably be an 0800 number (would it?) and would they be calling me, this sex searching hoard? Probably not. Especially as I hadn’t had a shower for three days or changed my underpants. (Well it is the World Championships! Mind you, there is a certain market…)


But I am getting off the point. If I ever had one.


“I just need to check my diary,” I said to the nice young lady, in my best up-and-coming novelist voice.


I clicked open iCal on my Mac (very professional), clicked over to the correct month.


“Yes,” I said. “I’m free for the whole of May. You’re lucky.”


It was that final ‘you’re lucky’ that clinched it, I think.


Or the fact that I’ve never been on a writing course. Well, not exactly true. When I was at Sixth Form College we had some visiting writers. One of them, I remember, was an up-and-coming young poet who had had some poetry translated into Flemish and had been quite a success (sold three copies!) and for next twenty years she had been visiting minor colleges of education to spread the vibe.


Those interested had to submit their writing and then attend two workshops in place of our regular afternoon A level English classes.


“What we’ll do,” said this poet, “is read out the bits we like the best and then after, we can all discuss what we like about them. We won’t mention names.”


“Oh shit,” I thought. As each piece was read out I just wanted to leap up and admit it was me. You see, it was like one of those Agatha Christie novels where they are going to reveal the killer. I thought all eyes were on me. I had done it.


At the end of the eighth extract of teenage suicide and angst, actually angst and teenage suicide, that way around, the young poet stopped.


“What I liked about all your work,” she said, “was its deep and serious nature.”


I had submitted a piece about a man who dresses up as a woman in order to engage a private dick and ends up having an affair with him. It was a parody of a Damon Runyon story. It was supposed to be goddam funny!


After the session came to an end my English teacher came up to me. “I didn’t give them your story,” she said. “I didn’t think it was representative of what you could do.”


That’s true.


And true of what I feel about my writing today. Not good enough to be taken seriously. In my head it is serious, it just comes out funny.


That’s true too.

Currently reading - Pandora in the Congo, Albert Sanchez Pinol


Currently listening to - Play Moolah Rouge, I Am Kloot

Story Hour in the Library, Oakley Hall with Michael Chabon

Me and Mickie James Launch

I don’t know what’s happened to this week. It’s like a salt and vinegar crisp someone holds under your nose. You turn your head away, you turn back, and it’s gone. Just gone.


However, I have now confirmed the date for the Me and Mickie James launch party. It’s going to be on July 22nd starting at 6:00pm in Waterstones, Market St, Leicester. There will be a reading, a chance to buy the book and free refreshments and music. Afterwards will be drinks and things at The Basement Bar.


I’m not quite sure what the things will be (a naked dancing boy? Several naked dancing boys? Lots of them?) but it will certainly be a good chance to buy me a drink. Haha.
Everyone is welcome. Especially as I have visions of myself standing alone in an empty room full of wine and books. Now you put it like that…


If you want to come just email me here or just turn up. Or if you have Facebook the event is here.


In my head I have been thinking about what I want to say. This is usually witty and erudite but I will probably turn out to be more like Bukowski. He was so shy that he used to get drunk before he was on and then become abusive. People loved it. Anything like the success of his novel Post Office would be amazing. He wrote it in a couple of weeks and then it went on to sell millions.


Of course any kind of success would be amazing. It’s quite a scary thing, wondering if this thing that has been produced with my name on it is just going to disappear.


I’ve had two emails this week which have started, ‘I know you must be very busy.’ If being ‘very busy’ means sitting watching the snooker every day and drinking beer then I am. Definitely. I am really very very busy.


I had a nice day in Sheffield last Tuesday thanks at the World Championship and I am there again tomorrow. Keep your eyes peeled. I will be the one in the audience naked except for a copy of Me and Mickie James strategically placed ( balanced on my nose).


Well, you’ve got to haven’t you? And I can’t bear the thought of being on Big Brother.

Currently reading - Northern Lights, Philip Pullman (I loved reading Once Upon a Time in the North last week and now have started on the Dark Materials trilogy. It’s great.

Currently listening - Hallam Foe, Original Soundtrack

Young Adam music video

Arse Licking for Beginners

Today is the first day of the 2008 World Snooker Championships. I am sitting here with the BBC Sport Player open in the top right corner of my screen. For your information, it’s 0 - 0, John Higgins vs. Matthew Stevens, in the first frame of the first round.


How exciting!


For the next two weeks (and a bit) we’re going to have lots of men bent over tables. What could be better?


There is a small side-show every year regarding the Women’s World Snooker Championship. No doubt this is someone’s idea of a drive for parity. Haven’t we already got enough women bending over tables?


In every cop movie, gangster movie, any American teen movie, there are plenty of women, usually waitresses, bending over tables. And in skimpy clothes!


When these films feature men, on a regular basis, in hot pants, legs up at 90 degrees asking ‘Coffee?’ while being ogled by A list stars then surely this will be the time to talk in a reasonable manner about parity.


For now, the World Snooker Championship provides a highly respectable milieu for men to bed over tables.


In a strange quirk of fate this week my story Arse Licking for Beginners has been published over on Velvet Mafia. It consists of eight 200 words stories about… (Actually the last story grew slightly in length.)


Hang on, there’s someone at the door.


*Drew goes to door, opens it. Frankie Howard marches in, gives a twirl and goes back out.*


It is now 1 - 0 to Matthew Stevens.


I have written before about how I came to be writing erotic fiction here but I don’t know that my writing is erotic. It is basically the same kind of story with a big naked arse in it. That’s a tip for writers by the way.


Perhaps David Mackenzie is of the same mind. I watched his film, Hallam Foe, last night. Mackenzie has previously filmed the controversial erotic book Young Adam. Before Hallam Foe started there was a warning that the film contained very strong language and sex.


It didn’t actually although you did get to see Jamie Bell’s bum quite a lot.


It’s a brilliant film! Intelligent and odd and unusual and you never know where it’s going to go.


Hallam’s mother has died and he has retreated from the world to his treehouse with his binoculars. He likes to watch people, having sex, but it is not an erotic thing. He is trying to connect.


After an encounter with his step-mother he runs away to Edinburgh. He sees a woman who reminds him of his mother and he follows her, scooting across the rooftop of the city, hiding in a disused clock.


What could be quite an uncomfortable premise, is in fact not. Watch it.


And finally, although it doesn’t fit into this week’s theme of bums, but it is another part of the body.


*Good link Drew*


I went to see Elbow at Rock City this week. They were awesome, possibly the best concert I have ever seen. Guy Garvey is a great showman and entertainer. You can listen to him here.

Currently reading - Philip Pullman, Once Upon a Time in the North


Currently listening to - Guillemots, Red




Elbow - One Day Like This

Brilliant!

I finally got the proof copy of ‘Me and Mickie James’ this week. I have it next to me now. It looks just like the finished thing except the cover is white (instead of black) and it has ‘Free Jonathan Cape Proof Copy’ on the back.


It’s brilliant!


Brilliant is my new favourite word. I went to see Son of Rambow last week. If you haven’t seen this then you should. It’s the best film ever made.


A young Brethren boy, Will Proudfoot, sitting outside the classroom at school while the rest of his class are watching tv, (he is not allowed), encounters the school rebel, Lee Carter, who has been thrown out of his own class.


Lee is making his own version of Rambo for a BBC TV talent contest and he bullies Will into helping him. Will, quite surprisingly, finds this brilliant! and throws himself into it.


I heard Garth Jennings, the writer / director talking about the film on Mark Kermode’s film review show. He was so enthusiastic and excited. He said ‘Brilliant!’ about a hundred times. This is the way forward. Life should be fun.


At work I found myself saying it.


“You’re reporting a burglary? Brilliant!”


I also heard from my publicist this week. She sent me a list of magazines, newspapers she had sent ‘Me and Mickie James’ and she said she would have a chat with The Independent about me.


Brilliant, I thought and she asked me if I had any ideas for journalism, travel, music, gay opinion pieces and if I did she could pitch them.


You know what I thought of that. It begins with ‘B’. I drank some wine and danced around my living room. I bought Groove Armada’s Late Night Tales this week. It’s perfect for late nights and it has a Will Self story on it too.


Nothing may come of it and nothing in my life changes, not really. If it wasn’t this I’d find another reason to drink red wine and dance around my living room. It’s what I’m good at. I read the first chapter of M&MJ. I realised it’s my writing life transposed onto a pop group.
Down By Law want to be famous. But that’s not the things that make them happy. It’s other stuff, like not having a toilet that flushes, or entertaining orphans of war, or maybe supporting Shawaddywaddy.


I wouldn’t want to be famous. I wouldn’t want to present the National Lottery, appear on a game show, be in the X Factor. Those things are empty. But I would like the wine on the way.

2 other things: I’ve got some interviews lined up. To get myself in the mood I read an author interview on the Guardian website, it’s with James Kelman. Read it here. One word. Yikes!

I have also updated my website. Visit the new and improved www.drewgummerson.co.uk

Currently reading The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton


Currently listening to Reverend and the Makers

Son of Rambow

I’m a book designer! I’m famous!

This week I got my contract from the BBC for ‘Teeth’. It will be recorded in the same studio as the Archers, although not at the same time. Then it will be broadcast in July. I’m not going to be reading it, people ask me that. Nor will I be famous. Some people say that too.


“You’re going to be famous. You’re on the radio.”


These are the same people who when I mention my book ask, “How many pages is it?” Then when I show them the cover, “Did you design it?”


That’s right. I’m a book designer. I’ve just kept it quiet.


Then they go on to say, “It might be a film. Just think.”


I’m thinking. I love books. I write books. I’m happy that it’s a book and that’s why I wrote it as a book. If I wanted to be famous I would have a sex change, swim the channel to the Netherlands and then tie myself to the wing of a windmill while local children throw wet flannels at me denouncing the plight of Iraqi wildlife.


“Those bombs, played havoc with the camels. Yes sir!”


So I’m excited, I’m going to be on the radio. It might be a film! And while we’re not talking about money I’m being paid £260. People want to ask that too.


I admit it. I am famous and rich!


Move out of the way of the roller-coaster of my life before you completely lose your breath and asphyxiate yourself slowly.


This is at exciting as it gets. Today I’ve been moving between the sofa and my bed reading ‘Penguin Special’. This is a history of Penguin books. This is what the rich and famous do.


Penguin Books was started by Allen Lane in about 1935. Before that cheap, high quality paperbacks weren’t available. Penguins were sold for 6p and you could buy them in Woolworth’s. The fist ten included books by Agatha Christie, Hemingway, Dorothy L Sayers. Other publishers thought Lane was mad.


The first twenty included reprints of ten Jonathan Cape books. Cape had a literary list second to none (and still true today - they are my publisher). Lane went to see Cape. Cape negotiated Lane’s offer up from a £25 advance per book to £40.


Cape was described as the ‘most tight-fisted bastard’. Cape thought the Penguins would be a disaster but if they were going to be a disaster he ‘wanted to get £400 off Lane’.


Of course they were a huge success, selling millions in the first year to the new mass market of the 1930s, offices were springing up everywhere, there was a new middle class.


Virginia Woolf was horrified. She didn’t think that kind of person should be reading. But she wasn’t very nice, was she?


I bought a Penguin myself this week. A new edition of The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton. It has the most brilliant cover and is part of Penguin Red Classics. In the same series, Books for Boys, are The 39 Steps, The Lost World, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Riddle of the Sands, She.


I’ve read them all except She.


What a brilliant world, with such things in it.

Currently reading - see above


Currently listening to - Strangefolk by Kula Shaker

Orson Wells players present - ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’

You also called Kent the same thing

Just enjoy it. I’ve been telling myself that this week.

That’s probably easier said than done if this week’s Curse of Comedy is anything to go by. This week it was Hancock and Joan, the doomed relationship between Tony Hancock and Joan Le Mesurier.

It didn’t show any of the good times. Bang, it started with Hancock in rehab, his first meeting with Joan and it was downhill from there.

“You called my mother a c…” says Joan as Hancock is back in hospital. “I can’t even bring myself to say it.”

She smiles.

“You also called Kent the same thing.”

Hancock smiles. “I called Kent a cunt?”

They laugh, or seem to. In fact Hancock is crying.

I wanted to say to him, ‘Just enjoy it’. He had that tremendous success. But it was never enough, or the right kind of success. So in lieu of being able to tell Hancock (being dead, a messy suicide in Sydney) I’ve been telling myself.

‘Just enjoy it.’

It’s easy to forget because we always want more. But I’m going to enjoy it. Three months and a bit now to Me and Mickie James coming out. I have a good publisher. The person who read it at Dazed and Confused loved it. I’m going to be on the radio. I have a launch and other events.

It’s brilliant.

But then you read something like ‘Then We Came to the End’ and you think, ‘I want to be as brilliant as that. Now, that is brilliant!’
I loved it. It’s about office life. It’s narrated by ‘we’.

“We were fractious and overpaid. Our morning lacked promise.”

The characters drift in and out of each other’s offices. Stories are started by one and then continued by another, they start out with the mundane. “I’ve been to McDonalds” but turn into something else, a colleague whose child has been abducted and murdered mourning in the McDonald’s PlayStation.

“No a PlayStation is something else.”

“What?”

“A PlayStation. It’s a games console.”

“You’re missing the point.”

This colleague is sitting in the balls, just looking at them day after day. Or someone else being left a totem pole in a will, someone stealing someone else’s medication, someone dying of cancer. All their dreams - writing a novel, a film, quoting Emerson, Thoreau, not thinking about life.

“There are two things you can’t advertise. Fat people and death.”

But while they are scooting around the office, swapping chairs in fear (that’s a long story), life is ongoing.

And if I could write something like that then I would be happy.

I would, I’d be happy. I’d be happy with that.

I’d be happy.

Currently listening to - The Whip, X Marks Destination

Currently reading - Bad Traffic, Simon Lewis

Clip from The Rebel

Unhappy Funny People

I’ll be quick today. I’ve got to be off soon to the daily grind and I’ve got to feed my ex-cat on the way.


Actually first something that made me chuckle at work. A domestic incident - ‘BOYFRIEND AND GIRLFRIEND ARGUE OVER BOYFRIENDS ATTITUDE.’


Well, perhaps you would be upset if your boyfriend was buying a magazine for gay men. Or perhaps she wanted to read it and he wanted it first? Who knows?


I’ve had almost a week off from writing and have been instead watching BBC4’s season of programmes about unhappy funny people. First off was ‘Steptoe and Son’.


‘Steptoe and Son’ is a memory from my early childhood. I didn’t know that Harry H Corbett wanted to be a serious actor, or Wilfred Bramble was a repressed homosexual. I didn’t know that they hated each other, and the show, and their lives.


It was all pretty grim.


I thought about my life. If they made it into a tv show would it be equally grim? Is my life tragic because I go to work in an office doing a job I don’t particularly like? And I have something that I’m passionate about, can escape to. (The writing. I don’t own a caravan in Skegness if you were wondering…)


What about the people who don’t have this thing that they do? Are they more tragic than Corbett and Bramble?


They must have good times I thought. This was upheld by the Mark Lawson interview with Galton and Simpson, the writers of Steptoe (and Hancock’s Half Hour). Of Hancock, ‘He wasn’t depressed when he worked with us’. They talked about how happy Corbett and Bramble were to do the Steptoe series.


And they talked how happy they were to get their first letter from the BBC. In their late 70s they still had a big smile on their face. Two weeks ago I got my first call from the BBC. I can understand that.


Sellers in ‘The Life and Death of Peter Sellers’ seemed to be unhappy in a different way. He was equally trapped, by the Clouseau role, but his belief in himself seemed to allow him to treat everyone around him badly. You don’t have to be nice when you are powerful.


I can appreciate that. The things I quietly seethe about now I would stand on rooftops and shout about if I had more than two half-pennies to rub together. Which is why it is a good thing that I will always be a complete failure. It keeps me nice.


I also read some good books this week. Finished ‘Submarine’, which was great. Then ‘Boy A’ which is a good companion piece to ‘Submarine’. I read a collection of brilliant short stories, ‘Caravan Thieves’ and started to read also the history of Penguin books, ‘Penguin Special’.


Yesterday I started writing again. A new short story. Or it might be a long one.

Currently reading - Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris


Currently listening to - Beginning of the Twist - Futureheads

Geoffrey Rush as Sellers:</B

Me and Mickie James: Review Copies

I got a call from my agent two days ago. She was excited. “Have you seen them?”


I hadn’t. Because I was floundering in a sea of ignorance. I had done an eleven and a half hour shift at work and I think I’m exhausted anyway. I’ve edited one book in the last year, written a new one, work full-time, go to gym and so on. I’ve never felt like this.


“The proofs of Me and Mickie James are ready!!”


The proofs apparently look exactly like the real book, and are used to send out for review. So I’m going to see my book, much sooner than I thought I would. She told me they looked fantastic.


Then I realised I had a missed parcel delivery leaflet through my door - 2 parcels it said. So that must be it.


Suddenly I had energy.


I was told copies had been sent out to Nick Hornby, Roddy Doyle, Alex James, William Sutcliffe, Dan Rhodes. Who else did I want it to go to?


Of course, all those people probably get loads of books and it doesn’t mean they will read mine but still…


I’m proud even to be thought worthy.


“You don’t seem to lack confidence,” someone said at work.


It’s not a lack of confidence. It’s more complicated than that and I don’t know that I can explain it. You dream of certain things and you think those things are dreams.


I didn’t sleep that night, much. The next morning I made my own list. I put on people who would be my ‘dream quotation’ for my book. I sent it off.


Then I cycled off to the parcel collection office. Two parcels. One must be my book. I cycled home. Opened them up.

1. A double pack of Jia Zhang-Ke films I’d ordered from Amazon. (On Sunday I’d gone to see Still Life at the cinema - a brilliant film about the Three Gorges Dam.)

2. The latest copy of McSweeneys from America.

I was pleased to see these things but they weren’t my book.


McSweeneys this month is two pocket-sized books like they used to send out to troops in WWII and a larger hardbacked book, “Who Shall We Invade Next?” with an American flag on the front.


(On the inside flap of one of the smaller books apparently the Pentagon have said modern troops no longer have time to read so there are no funds allocated to send them books.)


Other good news. There may be article about me in trendy magazine. Note to self, trim nose hairs.


I have been invited to read / appear at the Lowdham Book Fair. Note to self, don’t get drunk on train on way.


Not that I would. But it’s always best to remind yourself of certain things just to keep your feet on the floor.

Currently listening to: new Elbow album (not exactly true but should arrive tomorrow and then I will be)


Currently reading: Submarine - Joe Dunthorne (I would have finished this but as I have been oscillating between high exhaustion and high excitement I haven’t had much time).

Scenes from Still Life