Stylish liars and petrol-pumps in pools of light: digressions on re-reading The Great Gatsby.

When off-stage, or screen, Actors ‘rest’. Copywriters read, or at least they ought to.  So, yesterday, being in the latest in-between phase of the freelance copywriter life (a phase increasingly lengthier than the active project/gig phase itself, as the three-headed apocalyptic career assassins of AI, Age(ism) and Advertising Eating Itself advance upon my territory with…

Going up a hill to come back down: in search of poetic inspiration 

For a long time I didn’t write anything at all. That’s not to say I didn’t think about writing – I always went around noticing things – such as, fascinating, but fleeting casts of light, couples in the street, not obviously arguing but with faces that suggested, not all was well. A Bristol, or a London hill, its character, buildings, history. The atmosphere of a pub. A bird in a tree, an overgrown graveyard. An unassuming lane…