Wednesday, April 16, 2025
He’s woken by her twitching beside him in the undergrowth, dreaming. Small gasps and whimpers as she squirms and jerks, eyes closed, body tensing and arching in the pitch dark under the black polythene sheet. It crackles as she moves, water dripping off the branches above them. He wants to reach out to muffle her but even twisting his body risks being heard. and he can hear the men smashing through the trees, closing in.
Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Two of us were studying music for the exams at the end of high school, and I was the only one also in the school band, private piano lessons, the village brass band, a swing jazz band doing gigs in the evenings. Music, as someone said, was my life. But I wasn’t on the list of the school’s best musicians, I’d just found, left by the school music teacher at the end of last term for his successor.
Finished reading: The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota 📚
Very English -Yorkshire countryside, botched communication, embarrassed romance, virulent racism.
Finished reading: Hello, Transcriber by Hannah Morrissey 📚
Midwest smalltown shithole noir, feels like no-budget indie film. Enjoyably scuzzy and down at heel.
Finished reading: Torch by lin anderson 📚 Meh.
Trump’s best thought of as a social media platform in himself. He exists to keep people’s attention; that’s his remuneration. more than the money. He has to come up with more and more weird, demanding stuff to keep that attention. The rest is just a means to that end.
Thursday, April 10, 2025
The woman in the supermarket queue in front of me is swivelling left to right, eyes panicky wide, combing the gaudy aisles of the supermarket. Wedged into place, she tries to bend light around people cross-currenting through the wide gutter between the cash registers and the rows of shelves to see what she was looking for. At the other end of the cereal aisle, a young girl takes a man’s hand and walks away from her.
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
Finished reading: Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad by Daniel Finkelstein 📚 Everybody should read this. It manages to put both the Holocaust and the Stalinist famines in human terms and closer to comprehensible than anything else I’ve read.
Finished reading: Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd 📚 More of the reliably cracking mid-20th century Zeligishness, somewhere in the general ballpark of Greene, Deighton and Muriel Spark.
Finished reading: The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov 📚
Snarky and charming police procedural where the police are ambivalent and making up the procedure as they go along.
On the opposite pavement, a bloke in a tracksuit has paused, phone in hand, to shout at my compost recycling bin.
Abandoned: Death Under Little Sky by Stig Abell 📚
This is what happens when an arts journalist thinks he’ll knock out a cosey whodunit during lockdown and it turns out he’s never heard a human speak and can’t manufacture a moment’s suspense. Holy fuck it’s awful. Did not finish.
Finished reading: Sociopath by Patric Gagne 📚
I had far more sympathy for sociopaths after reading this than I did before. Which is exactly what a sociopath would want, when you think about it…
I’ve lost interest in politics. British politics isn’t relevant, I don’t have the appetite to the learn the detail of Canadian politics, and anyway, it’s all mad and scary, and will happen whether or not I know about it.
Thursday, March 27, 2025
As everyone says, McCloskey’s very good, and shifting more to character and personal betrayals just makes him even better.
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Another one of those tech bro biogs where all the good bits have been in the news anyway.
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
The sexton had seen this before. A year after the funeral, a thin strip of pale dead yellow grass outlined the shape of a coffin in the burial ground, like it had been crushed by the dark. The sexton had known the occupant of the coffin and he was happier now she was in the earth instead of on it. But the outline worried him. He imagined malignant goo seeping up from crack of the coffin lid.