It’s the things you don’t do that won’t go away. In the third year at Grammar School they streamed us into two half years. My on-off mate Phil went into the bottom group. I went in the top one, where I tentatively established a friendship with the coolest kids in the year. They spent their lunch hours smoking and listening to sounds at the home of Chris (who spelt it ‘Kris’) nearby. I was always on the edge of this group, though, the new kid. Taking Kris as my fourteenth birthday guest to our first gig, the Pink Floyd at Liverpool Empire, seemed like a smart move on my part. Then the ground shifted again. For the fourth year, a middle group was created –…
‘Where do you find your new music?’ the Radio 2 DJ asked me, when we were off-air. ‘MP3 blogs? What are they?’ Taking it easy today, as I was struck down with pleurisy earlier in the week and the antibiotics have yet to really kick in. I dragged myself up to the computer because today’s Observer listed a free download of a track by Uffie, a new soul singer I like. The link didn’t work (maybe the track had been taken down) but I got several other good tracks from the site it led me to, and it turned out I had the Uffie track already, downloaded elsewhere. Since I’m sitting here, I’ve decided to update my mp3 blog bookmark folder (many mp3 blogs, like…
Mike’s week-long marathon is at an end and Shaggy Blog Stories is digitally published. You can buy it here for a mere £8.96 of which £3.63 goes to Comic Relief (the online publishers, Lulu, have donated all their profit but note you have to add postage). I had trouble coming up with my own contribution to the book (I don’t really do ‘funny’ which was the qualification for inclusion). Then I looked at my handful of deleted posts. Most of these were ones I removed when I wanted to keep entries about a conference I was running high on the site, but the one in the book (I can be found at number 78 of 100)… let’s just say that while it’s a wry, kind…
My old mucker Mike, aka Troubled Diva, has come up with a splendid idea to raise money for Children In Need, for Red Nose day (a week today in the UK). He’s putting together an instant anthology of blog writing, to be called ‘Shaggy Blog Stories’, which will be published next Friday (proper print published, with a designed cover, via the wonders of digital technology). An appearance in the book is open to all UK bloggers (resident or abroad) and entries (taken from your blog archive) should be briefish (max 1,000 words, though exceptionally, 1,500 – no images or html) and, it being Red Nose Day, funny. If you want to contribute, the deadline is 6pm UK on Wednesday March 14th, but the earlier the…
The poet Julia Casterton died on Saturday, after a short illness, as a result of a long standing blood disorder. Julia was a fine poet, a remarkable tutor of Creative Writing and a lovely woman. She wrote the landmark ‘Creative Writing: A Practical Guide’, still one of the best books on the subject. I first met her in 1990, when I discovered that she had been largely responsible for the acceptance of my first published story in Ambit Magazine, fighting for its controversial content the previous year. She remained an editor at Ambit and was always a generous teacher and editor. Perhaps these were reasons why her only full length collection was long coming. ‘The Doves Of Finisterre’ is a powerful, intelligent, wide ranging book,…