I took a day off yesterday. Got a cheap train to London and spent the journey reading Michael Eaton’s excellent BFI Classic about ‘Our Friends In The North’, Peter Flannery’s brilliant 1997 TV drama series that BBC4 have just begun a repeat showing of (I rewatched the whole thing on DVD over a week last year and it holds up incredibly well). Then I wandered round the Tate Modern, soundtracking the rehung artworks with my iPod (a live orchestral ‘Atom Heart Mother’ was rather more impressive than the Whiteread white boxes, while the Dexy’s Midnight Runners worked surprisingly well with the surrealists. Bowie’s ‘Low’ didn’t quite mix with Rothko). Then a quick bit of bookshopping on the Charing Cross Road (one shop had a set…

It’s been several years since my last letter in The Guardian and this one appears at the end of the letters section in The Review, so a lot of readers might miss it. If you’re interested in Stanley Middleton, VS Naipaul, fake submissions to agents and the like, do follow the link above and scroll down. If you want to read the original story that set this correspondence off, go here.

Regular readers will remember that each year, we send interested friends our best of year CD, a selection of the music we’ve enjoyed most in the previous year. This year, with twenty days to go before the end of the year, I thought I’d add some sleevenotes, a song a day (or near enough – it’s one way of getting me to post regularly). Scroll down for more literary stuff. Those of you expecting to receive the CD may wish to look away until yours arrives. I start burning today (December 11). Oh, and one update before I start. Following this site’s campaign back in February, the Maze has just reopened as a venue and the Cosmic American Music Club will resume promoting gigs there…

On Friday night, Five Leaves Publications had a great launch party in the ballroom of Nottingham’s Council House. They’ve published two new books to celebrate their tenth anniversary. One is ‘Poetry:The Nottingham Collection’, edited by my friend John Lucas. It features two poems apiece by 53 mostly living poets with Notts connections, and is a mere 7.99. The other is the imaginatively titled ‘Sunday Night And Monday Morning’ edited by my friend and neighbour, James Urquhart, who is a literary reviewer. It contains fifteen, mostly brand new, short stories by Nottingham writers like Jon McGregor, Clare Littleford, John Harvey, Nicola Monaghan, Eve Makis, Stephan Collishaw and Clare Brown, all of whom were at the party, and three of whom are graduates of the Creative Writing…

The weather has been glorious for the last ten days. Bad weather’s always the biggest risk when you book a holiday in the UK, but we lucked out on our trip to Dorset. Those obscene 4 by 4 behemoths jam the narrow lanes but, otherwise, the county shows England at its most appealing. We had an Enid Blyton seaside holiday, interspersed with cream teas, long walks, fish suppers and trips to bookshops. This seems to be one county where the internet hasn’t yet closed down the majority of second hand bookshops. Browsing in them is, for me, one of life’s great joys. You never know what you’ll find. On our final day in Bridport, I got my hands on a book I’ve been after for…