I owe my life to a second-hand bookshop

Once upon a time a young woman opened a bookshop…

Audi Quattro ‘Ahab’

If only more ads were as good as this. This American commercial for Audi Quattro is excellent. Based on a strong but simple idea, it draws inspiration from Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’, but here it is a Great White Car rather than a Whale that is pursued by a man obsessed with hooking the thing. (What…

Visual inspiration from The Mag

Is there anything beneath your surface?
Maybe you’re all surface?
Hello…Hello…Hell No,
No ripples on your vacant face

Booker Prize 2011 – A triumph for the genre novel?

The dust has settled and the shoot-out at the literary salon is over. Julian Barnes has outgunned The Sisters Brothers and the rest of the not-so-magnificent five. The critics and literati have grumbled and sniped, whilst that endangered breed, the booksellers have rubbed their hands with glee at a welcome boost to their sales.

Poems from booktitles

Just entered a Guardian blog challenge to try to make poems from book titles. My effort’s below. Here’s the link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/oct/06/compose-a-poem-from-book-titles The Poetry of book titles As I walked out one midsummer morning Neither here nor there Dreams of leaving Linger awhile Landscape and memory, Like water for chocolate, Different Seasons Clinging to the wreckage…

Why I used to love Twitter (a bit, despite the bile)

Well, this hasn’t aged well. I did used to enjoy the old place. Nov 2022 Update. Now there’s a title I wouldn’t use anymore. But for me, most of the following still stands, ego maniac, conspiracy spouting billionaires not withstanding. One obvious caveat, I’m white, male and not at all famous, so attract bile and personal…

Lost in t’Nidderdale League: The Secret Cricketer

Although I’m from Bristol and therefore, in Cricketing terms, ought to support Gloucestershire, to me Yorkshire has always seemed to be the spiritual home of English cricket.

In numbers terms alone it makes sense. In the Vale of York, just one local league amongst many the Nidderdale League features 54 teams, including the likes of Alne and Beckwithshaw, Kirkby Malzeard, Masham, Newton-Le-Willows, Raskelf, Spofforth and Whixley.

But only one team in this league has ever lost so badly that their local shame became national news.

A quote from Victor Hugo

Found this indirectly via ‘Little White Lies’ – an excellent film magazine – in the current Apocalypse Now issue. “Superstition, bigotry and prejudice, ghosts though they are, cling tenanciously to life; they are shades armed with tooth and claw. They must be grappled with unceasingly, for it is a fateful part of human destiny that…

Bookshelf invitation – Magpie Tales

Magpie tales blog asked people to write a poem, or vignette based on this picture: To make it tougher, I gave myself thirty minutes. Here’s my response. Every book is unfinished. The secret’s out. There’s something lacking within, And they squat on the shelves going nowhere. Abandoned on the edge of the road. Mere objects…

Record Store Day – Here’s to Revolver Records, Bristol.

As a teenager in the eighties my hometown seemed blessed with a surprising variety of record shops, but I always saw Revolver as the one true emporium of cool.

The Narroways

We knew it wasn’t ours – considered it on loan,
sliver of old wild earth made common ground,
swallowed by city, only partially digested,
an accidental place, become essential.

Arriving at Whitby

And coming down from high moors
I caught a whiff of Whitby,
Through bitching rain, a coastal squall,
Came a smalltown smell so subtle almost dreamt

The Green – after Wallace Stevens

My attempt to sound a little like Wallace Stevens, with a poem about a mythic Green Man.

An ill-fated encounter between a pompous git* and a pram.

Why is it that a certain kind of person in this country finds it so hard to accept that children exist? It’s not as if they are a rarity. If you have or know children, you’ve probably encountered the type. They’re often male, but not exclusively, usually fairly well-off and long past their own youth.…