I planned to get on the road by eleven. The drive should take less than four hours and the worst queues were meant to be from four in the afternoon onwards. But when I got up, it was wet, and getting wetter… getting organised seemed to take longer and longer (“It’s like sending someone off on a school trip” Sue said later). As I got to the point where I was actually ready, Sue suggested that I leave it until Friday as it was so wet. I refused to be tempted, finally setting off at twenty to one. I got a decent route print out from Routemaster on Sue’s laptop which I followed. The first three hours of the journey were a doddle, apart from…
I’m not going to Glastonbury this year, though, of course I know a bunch of people who are, and I’ll be avidly watching as much as I can on the BBC. So there’ll be no new entries in what has always been this site’s most-read feature, my Glastonbury diaries, the 2003 and 2009 versions of which can be found by searching the archives. It was the most-read feature on my old website too, but the links to those Geocities pages have long gone, since Geocities closed down last year, taking 38 million pages with it. Some of those pages have been archived, but when I searched for ones from my old site (which ran from 2000-2003) I couldn’t find them. However, today, just in time…
For my first post proper on this blog, I want to deal with one of those things that I’ve meant to write about before but has always seemed too petty. Indulge me while I go a bit Nicholson Baker. One of the trickier aspects of getting older is whether to change your name. All Davids (except the insufferably up themselves ones) are Daves in their youth, and remain ‘Dave’ to people who have known them since then. But, at some point, we ‘Dave’s have to decide what name to go by professionally. As a schoolteacher, in my mid 20’s, I chose to go by ‘Dave’. It would have felt pompous to do otherwise. Then my first short story was accepted for publication. A fortnight later,…
Welcome to my new website and blog. One of the new things that I plan to do here is post a song of the week, every week. As an appropriate way to start, here’s a superb new song, The Suburbs, from the forthcoming Arcade Fire album. It’s just come out on a white label 12″. Can’t wait to hear the album and see them live again. Note that songs of the week are for promotional purposes and will only be available for a short time, so visit often! Some will be songs that the artists themselves have released to the internet, like this one. Others will be obscurities that have never been released on CD or favourite numbers by artists that I believe deserve wider…
This will be the last post on this blog in the old format. Next month, it will return with a new look, at the same address. I wasn’t planning to write any more entries, wanting to keep the Stanley Middleton event as the top item until it was over. But the Stanley celebration is now fully booked (see below) so there’s no need. And this weekend, my thoughts have been dominated by the deaths, after long illnesses, of two other writers who I was lucky enough to know: Peter Porter, who died on Friday, and Alan Sillitoe, who died last night. I first met Alan in 1996. I got to meet him for the same reason that I got to know Stanley. I persuaded both…