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Thirty Year Man
Clive James was 70 this week. When he was a mere stripling in his thirties, I discovered the work he had done with Pete Atkin on a series of albums just coming to a premature end in the face of indifference from the great British public and the big record companies. I’ve been a fan…
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Last Chance to See…
Anxious as ever to be present at the cutting edge of vibrantly youthful popular culture, I hied me to the Bridgewater Hall on Friday, accompanied by ‘er indoors and the man also known as the Silver Fox to witness a concert by two up and coming youngsters playing modern music. The elder of the two…
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Moderation in all things
One of the unexpected benefits of comment moderation has been that I’ve picked up on some comments on old posts that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen – including some spam from China.So, it seems that my titanic struggle with Writers Bureau wasn’t quite the success I had thought judging by the new comment. I’ll see…
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Dee Time
It’s a never-failing indication of creeping old age when icons of your youth die. I’m old enough to have been enthralled by Simon Dee’s tea-time show on TV. To an adolescent in grimy Moston, he seemed effortlessly cool, roaring off into the sunset in his E-type as the credits rolled at the end of the…
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Fair enough
So I’m in the local Co-op buying a bottle of wine. Spotty youth at the checkout is trying to scan it but it won’t scan. He asks his camp co-worker why it won’t. “Well, it’s obvious”, he says. “This is an evil bottle of wine – it’s not Fairtrade, so it’s probably produced by enslaved…
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Apture
Just a quick post to say that I’ve enabled a new widget called Apture, which should produce lots of multi-media links at the click of a mouse, as MC Desmo says.
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Trolls
I suppose blogging is a kind of vanity publishing. There’s no quality control – I can write what I like. But the main difference between Topsyturvydom and some execrable self-published collection of poems is that I can, to some extent, control the reaction to it. After all, an author publishing in the usual way is…
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Volleying and thundering
You would think I might get these all right. No, I got 6 / 7. I even got the question on To Kill a Bleeding Mockingbird right. What I got wrong is the question on The Charge of the Light Brigade, where I was invited to declare why Tennyson had used certain verbs. All the…
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Utt(er)ly barmy
Authors routinely complain about boorish punters at book signings, but I don’t think any of them tried the Uttley solution. The formidable children’s author apparently didn’t like the prospect of dealing with real children: Dimly, she perceived an overwhelming mob running at her and with British pluck she unhesitatingly grabbed her duck-handled umbrella and waded…
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Voluntary = Compulsory
In the brave new world of education, a “voluntary” contribution to the cost of a child’s education is actually compulsory. Sample:It read like a letter from a debt-collector. “Our accounts indicate you have not made a contribution,” it stated. “Our records indicate you have not contacted us.” In fact, it was a letter from a…