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Thanks to Salt for sending me this collection, the latest eclectic volume in their series. It’s very much the mixture as before, with well-established authors rubbing shoulders with newer names, with stories garnered from a variety of sources, from the august (Granta, The Edinburgh Review) to the obscure (Willesden Herald New Short Stories 6) and…

Slack blogging around here of late, but I haven’t been completely idle. There was a blog for my Modernism students, which is still current, and available here. New posts to follow shortly.

Yesterday was graduation day at Edge Hill for students in my department. It was great to see them all together, in their academic robes, and to be part of the ceremony.  This year’s ceremony was different to most, in that we awarded an honorary degree to Mayer Hersh. As a survivor of Auschwitz, he would…

I’ve posted before about the fatuous and often bizarre language used by companies to describe what they do. The slogans and mission statements often use ‘solutions’ as a catch-all term, and tend to pomposity when describing the most mundane matters. I observed a cracker today, on a van belonging to a company I hadn’t heard…

I spotted this poster whilst enjoying an excellent Warsteiner at Mary and Archie’s yesterday. I took a picture on my rather basic phone, which is rubbish, so I found a better version here.  It’s a poster for Cream’s farewell gig, at the Royal Albert Hall, in November 1968. It’s fascinating for several reasons. The groovy…

I found this story astonishing. In the year of my birth,  about a mile from where I lived, a teenage girl was being sectioned under the mental health act for the crime of having a baby. That boy, a few months older than me, was adopted, and has never known his mother.  I thought this…

An interesting example of how stories are distorted in the telling, and how ‘news’ is created. Yesterday, at my place of work, there was a power cut. It happened around lunch time. I went out of my office to see if it was just my room, or more general. It was quickly apparent that the…

Playing around with Blogger’s new templates. I like this look – clean, I think.

In 1970-71, I had a Saturday job at a grocer’s on Oldham Street, Manchester. The shop, and the small chain it belonged to – Maypole – have long gone, of course, but when I bought some CDs yesterday, I was reminded of it. My wage, for a nine-hour day, was 25s, (£1.25) less 5d for…

Great snap of a foxy traveller.Credit: RadioKate