Beef

One day in the early 70s I was walking through the grounds of a mental hospital with my maternal grandfather, Simon.
He had been on the run from the Military Police since 1946. My mother, my two uncles and my aunt all ate well through the conflict.
Simon was a butcher.
We talked about the difference between living [...]

Pages from an old notebook

I remember a slum front room on a rain-broken morning. Weak sunlight filters through cracks in a raffia blind, throwing feint patterns onto a worn fireside rug.
A young woman sits on the rug with her knees drawn up supporting her face-down head. She’s crying. An occassional tear escapes and falls to the rug.
On a bed [...]

Someone has to do it

I have a friend who has recently found it difficult to write. Since he writes well — and always with sincerity — I don’t believe he has a problem.
I, on the other hand, do.
You see, the difference between my friend and I is that he longs to write for profit (no, I’ll re-phrase that: he [...]

Correction

My attention has recently been drawn to a typo in a piece I posted back in June about former underworld figure and author Paul Ferris.
I would like to make it clear that, to my knowledge, Paul has never been an informer and the piece should have read: ruthless enforcer.
I apologise for the error.

Charles Bukowski said:

“Being
photo-
graphed
does not
make
a man
a good
writer.
It doesn’t
make
a man
anything.”
Click here and you will see God

A literary hit-man

I used to write scripts for Tommy (Fatboy) Devine. Tommy Devine is ugly. You want to know how ugly he is? I’ll tell you.
When he’s born (series one, episode two) the midwife, a twenty-eight year old gay word puzzle enthusiast from Ohio, threatens to assassinate his mother. When he sees the kid he just falls [...]

A site to make you smile

In need of a little ego-reinforcement? Try this. I found it here, via here
Open browser and type http://your name.youaremighty.com in the address bar. Make sure your speakers are on.

Link Exchange

On the page bar at the top of the front page, just above my eye, is a button called “Link Exchange”.
Click on it and increase traffic to your blog.
Thanks to brianfox, who first had this idea and whose blog is well worth a visit.
See you in the mirror. 

Gun crime in the UK

While gun ownership in the UK is perhaps more tightly controlled than in any other European country, with gun crime constituting less than 1% of total crime, it is a fact that guns and incidents involving firearms are a quotidian feature of modern city life. So much so that out of the almost 11,000 firearms [...]

9/11

I guess everyone who has a blog or a newspaper column or a radio or TV talk show has a lot to say today. I’ll leave him/her to it.
On the subject of 9/11 I will be silent; I will follow the directive of one inarticulate soul who, in a comment to one of my posts, [...]