In A House By The Sea With An Electric Kettle

Added on 09 April 2011

Just back from a week on Exmoor. Well, on the edge of Exmoor. By the sea. In a house with an electric kettle. I like a kettle that sits on the stove and takes a while to boil and then whistles to let you know it's ready, forcing you to be on hand to turn it off. There's an aesthetic involved. Your ...

Revisiting An Old Anti-Blair Polemic

Added on 01 April 2011

This week I started taking a look at the old online Barney Thomson novel, Barney Thomson & The Half-Blood PM, with a view to it being the next book to go on Kindle. I wrote it in the lead-up to the 2005 General Election, with barbershop hero Barney Thomson being ordered to be Tony Blair's person...

Spring Is In The Air, The Capricious Bastard

Added on 31 March 2011

The sun's started shining and the days are warming up. It's inevitable, and there's nothing you can do about it. It's what happens in the spring. Even in Britain. Admittedly not much today, and certainly not yesterday. It was shit yesterday. But generally, over the last few weeks, it's been getting ...

The Lonesome Death of the 10 Second Novel

Added on 30 March 2011

We come at last to the end of the 10 Second-10 a.m. Barney Thomson Novel, the Twitter experiment that blazed a magnificent trail of fiction across the blogosphere, peaking in a shimmering miasma of irradiant beauty, before crashing quickly to earth, the bubble burst on a spiralling tale of drugs, wo...

Kindle, And The Bloody Burden of Expectation

Added on 29 March 2011

There's a great line near the end of Field of Dreams when Kevin Costner realises that the baseball player on the other side of the diamond is his father as a young man, brought back to him because Kevin built the field in the middle of a patch of corn. 'My God,' he says. 'I only saw him years later ...