If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!There’s a new tab on the Amazon home page. Kitchen and Home. The easy way to buy razors and fat-free grills online. Oh, and the Pocket Masseur: ‘Originally designed for the rapid relief of tension headaches, it’s now being […]

There’s money to be made from misery. Hunting for Sars on Google brings up a host of relevant sites and, running down the right-hand side of the page, half a dozen adverts for face masks. Is it callous, or merely opportunist? Perhaps it’s a public service. I can’t decide.
On eBay, someone is selling the domans […]

Tinned bombay potato tastes just the same as tinned vegetable balti. Is someone trying to pull a fast one? I think we should be told.
For some reason, though, I was craving it all through my swim. I seem to have regained my ability to paddle back and forth in straight lines - which had abandoned […]

Half an hour before doing last night’s piece on Through the Night, I started to lose my sight. I thought at first that I’d looked at a lightbulb or something and got one of those funny marks that stays in your eyes for a while, but by the time the ISDN started chirruping away with […]

The writing has gone well this weekend. 7,200 sparkly new words added to the novel, taking the limit up to just a little under 60,000. There are a few holes appearing here and there where I’ve got all excited and jumped ahead slightly, so the next job is to go back and patch them up […]

Anyone who ever questioned the way Greg Dyke was running the BBC would do well to read his analysis of how British and American media covered the Iraq war. He closes a stinging criticism of American media with the comment that ‘If Iraq proved anything, it was that the BBC cannot afford to mix patriotism […]

It’s eerily quiet here just now. No sound at all from upstairs. When the war was on I could hear John Simpson commentating through the floorboards. It was like being in a hideout beneath the deserts of northern Iraq. Even my young downstairs neighbours, who would have vigorous sex that lasted precisely half an hour […]

Returned to Mildreds for the first time in months. It’s moved to nice new premises just by the office, with a glass roof that lets the sun shine in through the day, and the lights of the kitchen windows in the overlooking flats at night. Had yummy sweet potato burgers and vegetable dumplings with fat […]

And I thought it was only for cooking…

It’s a real book; it’s on Amazon.

Woohoo! I passed the 50,000 word mark on my novel with almost a week to spare, which means I’ve written the equivalent of a 175-page book in three weeks.
Rather disappointingly, the 50,000th word was ‘was’. Something like ‘clandestine’, ‘invade’ or ‘annihilate’ would probably make the story sound a whole heap more interesting, but ‘was’ is […]