Square Eyes
Disgusting lurgy has one again laid waste to all I survey. Still plunged in bosom of family (rather like a twentysomething carvingknife), currently lying on sofa with a temperature and the five channels As God Intended Them (digibox-free and with, due to great age of TV, a big grey stripe down the side). Accordingly, am harbouring such feverish thoughts as ‘How beautiful is Zac Efron?’ (no, really, he’s like thingy from Twilight’s small cute brother, cf The One Show), ‘do I in fact want to be a nanny in the States?’ (Nanny 911) and ‘Please tilt your head, Daniella Westbrook, I want to inspect your reconstructed septum

The New Grub Street
Sorry for silence. NaNoWriMo – in all its adjective-laden, adverbally-challenged glory – is eating the screentime spat back out by jobhunts. I have half the recommended wordcount, a plot that’s racing towards the edge of a cliff, and one character I love so much it’s ridiculous. Occasionally a tangental paragraph about NOTHING (a blink-and-you’d-miss-her character watching Saturday telly with her grandchildren) blossoms into something like prose, but whenever I prod the plot, sentences start committing suicide. I’m worried t

oranges and lemons, say the bells of –
I’m in London Wednesday to Friday this week. Thursday’s fully booked during office hours but otherwise parental unit and I are free. I mean my mum – dad’s filming in Bristol, replete with masses of Sunday roast leftovers destined for some apocalyptic fry-up. He took them in a Pyrex bowl, it feels a bit like he’s the student. Our natural stomping ground is always Soho, Covent Garden, Charing Cross way (food, shops, books) – we used to stay in Piccadilly but this time, for various reasons, it’ll be the City. This is our second visit – until the first, I don’t think I’d ever set foot in the place before. I’m

this is the creed of hotel tumbleweed
Just blogged another photo to my photography blog (please, Sophie, make your written style more repetitivephotoblogphoto). I got incredibly lost the first time I tried to find Shakespeare & Co (my mother, should she read this, will interject to say that I’d seen Shakespeare & Co. before but mother th

NaNoWriMo, murder and the Wallace affair…
This is, I guess, an appropriate post for the run-up to Hallowe’en! Warning: gory/disturbing stuff beneath the cut (my first attempt at using one on WordPress, hope it works!) A couple of days ago, I signed up for NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. For the uninitiated, this is a worldwide online project where participants each write a novel – 50,000 words – in the 30 days of November. Since signups, I’ve been fretting about the possibilities of libel, slander and nobody speaking to me ever again. I hope this is merely a clever displacement activity to avoid the most likely reason for