If Jenny Diski has got it right (and she usually does), the ban on UK prisoners being sent books in the post actually happened back in November 13, but has only gone viral this month. That was because of an article by Frances Crook, Chief Executive of the Howard League For Penal Reform, to which I belong. Good for her. The Howard League are taking legal action (donate), with Geoffrey Robertson QC, to challenge the government’s perverse decision to treat books as some kind of luxury to be denied to prisoners as part of their ongoing commitment to retribution rather than rehabilitation. There were a bunch of very good letters about this in last Thursday’s Guardian (including an excellent one at the top by…

 This is the full version of my Wayne Evans interview, most of which appeared in last Friday’s Post. Last time I interviewed Wayne Evans, Gaffa’s songwriter, singer and bass player, was for my student newspaper in 1978. That was at The Imperial in James St, where Gaffa had a residency that pulled in hundreds of punters from every part of Nottingham, every Tuesday night. They deserved to be huge. We thought they would be. Gaffa have been going for 40 years, if you ignore a 30 year hiatus between 1981 and 2011, when they reformed for a storming gig at Nottingham Contemporary, where they return on March 1st. The next gig marks the launch of the first CD appearance of their only LP and a…

  If you’ve been waiting for a cheaper, mass market edition of the second Bone & Cane novel, What You Don’t Know, you’ll have had a long wait. Sadly, its publisher, Tindal St Press, went under 15 months ago. If you want a paper copy, I’d get a move on, as the book sold out its print run, but there are still a few around. In the meantime, the ebook edition has remained at an artificially high price, nearly eight quid. And there’s been nothing I could do about it. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, as of last week, I have the rights back to both Bone & Cane novels and they’re available again at bargain prices – for a limited…

I’ve been interested in the novels of BS Johnson since I was an undergraduate, living in the city that he wrote about in the classic ‘book-in-a-box’ The Unfortunates. I know three people who knew him, one of whom I wrote about extensively a few years ago. Every year I teach a session about Johnson to my second year creative writing undergrads. I’m not alone in this interest, of course, especially since Jonathan Coe’s fine biography of Johnson, Like A Fiery Elephant, sparked a load of reissues and revivals. Another big fan is my pal, the playwright Andy Barrett. Andy has a project he’s been discussing with me, one that might loosely fit into this years European theatre festival in Nottingham, NEAT, and I offered to tell people…

  Ray Gosling died yesterday. Ray was a Nottingham hero, fighting for the community in St Ann’s in the 60’s, and a wonderful broadcaster on TV and radio. I only got to know him after the death of his partner, Bryn, at the turn of the century. He was a mess then, a shambolic figure who I’d see now and then in the co-op we happened to share, until he went bankrupt and lost his house. After that, he began a slow, partial comeback, with a bunch of TV documentaries about his life falling apart. My colleague John Goodridge, at Nottingham Trent University, saved his huge accumulation of papers from going into skips and established an archive. After I got a job at NTU, running…