On Your Bike

Added on 18 November 2008

Kids. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t get them a contract to play outside linebacker with the New England Patriots until they’re twenty-two. We used to take the bikes to school, me and the bairns. It’s a twenty-two minute bike ride. When we started it was a little hairy. The...

A Short Walk Through the Weekend

Added on 17 November 2008

This weekend I received an e-mail from someone in Italy who is reading an Italian translation of the first Barney Thomson book. It was a lovely e-mail in which she described living in Scotland for a while, and how awful she thought it was, and that my book had given her a way to remember it more fon...

The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson (10th Anniversary Edition) #2

Added on 14 November 2008

Today is the official release date for the new edition of The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson. But you won’t find it in the shops... as they used to say on those K-Tel adverts for 100 Greatest Country & Western Songs of The 50’s or The Brighton & Hove Pan Pipe Band Play The Very ...

The Solomon Grundys

Added on 13 November 2008

Do you ever watch a documentary on tv about some sort of weird lifeform somewhere on the planet and say to your partner, you know Agnes, evolution just doesn’t cover that...? Apes to men is one thing, that seems straightforward enough. But a giant flower that sucks beetles inside it by releasi...

Alien v Predator 3 meets The Wombles

Added on 12 November 2008

Received an e-mail from my agent yesterday. That probably sounds like the kind of thing that writers get all the time. I usually have to struggle for mine. I share an agent with the writers of such films as Mrs Brown, The Full Monty, Billy Elliot and In Bruges. On the one hand this allows me to say ...