I’m a little bleary today so excuse me if I ramble a little. I woke up early thinking about how to handle a scene in the edit of the second Bone & Cane novel, couldn’t get back to sleep. I won’t be writing the new scene until Monday. I never write fiction on weekends. During the nine and a bit years that I was a schoolteacher, I wrote every Saturday that we were at home. Once I was earning enough to become a full time writer (seventeen years ago, this month) I decided to allow myself one weekend day off (inevitably, there’s always marking and preparation on Sundays). And although I have a part time job teaching Creative Writing at a university now, I still…
Yesterday we launched my fortieth novel, Secret Gardens, in the allotment at the back of our house, in Bagthorpe Gardens. These allotments, along with Nottingham’s Hungerhill Gardens (where the novel is set) are the oldest in the world. We’re lucky to have one. For health and safety reasons, not to mention the risk of having to cram everybody into the house if it rained, I couldn’t invite as many people as I would have liked, but please join us for a virtual book launch today. Raise a glass, eat a cake, and, most of all, please buy a copy of the book. (Yes, it’s a bit cheaper on Amazon, but they don’t have it in stock yet. That said, I’d really appreciate any Amazon reviews…
Just back from London, where we visited friends with a new baby and saw two excellent plays: Howard Brenton’s vastly entertaining ‘Anne Boleyn‘, revived from last year at The Globe, with a superb central performance by Miranda Raison and the terrific production of ‘Betrayal’ at the Comedy Theatre, starring Kristen Scott Thomas, Douglas Henshall and Ben Miles. Like many men my age, I’ve had a bit of a crush on Kristen since seeing her in the dreadful Prince movie, ‘Under The Cherry Moon’ and it was a joy to see her acting her socks off, becoming youngier and sexier as the play progresses (the story has a reverse chronology, which was nicked for the famous Seinfeld episode of the same name). Henshall is excellent as…
Late blog this week as we just spent 27 hours in Manchester, where we saw the opening of 11 Rooms, the group show at Manchester Art Gallery, where Marina Abramović’s naked crucified woman was the final and most memorable room we saw. In the first, a guy tried to exchange my hat for a stale croissant. I think the swap shop concept needs a bit more work before it becomes a work of art, or he ends up with anything decent at the end of the day. At the Whitworth, we happened up Atom Egoyan’s amazing installation, which appears in hardly any of the publicity and is accompanied by his 2002 film of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. 35mm film spools out of a side…
Suffering with a bad back, so not inclined to type a blog post, but I’d better be recovered by this time next week, as I’ll be standing in a small hall in Manchester, waiting for Bjork to come on stage. The image above is from her new show. I’m resisting reading the reviews as I like to be surprised, but they appear to be raves. Here’s a track that previews her new album, Biophilia. Bjork – Crystalline