Finished reading: Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper 📚
Well executed LA Confidential/Chinatown update. Quality pulp fiction.
Song
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
The lino round the base of the toilet is badly cut, leaving a few millimetres of gap between the porcelain and the curled edge of the vinyl. He lays on his side just a few centimetres away, the floor digging into his shoulder. He’s surrounded by the unforgiving hardness and months of built up scum, and the smell of shit and bleach sliding into his nostrils. In the bath, his guitar lies smashed, its neck broken, the slack strings echoing in the tub, water drumming on it from the showerhead.
Finished reading: Patriot by Alexei Navalny 📚
There’s a really good doc with him on BBC iPlayer, which would be time better spent.
Finished reading: Daughter Of Mine by Megan Miranda 📚
Murky past and the web of family tensions in small town America wrapped round a murder mystery. Smart and nuanced, if a bit complicated to keep tabs on if you listen rather than read it.
Gang
Thursday, March 13, 2025
She catches up with him in the corridor outside the classroom. He’s backed into a corner, she’s holding back, swaying from her ankles, her hand gripping her shoulderbag, pulling the strap down taut. They each have thousands of words - using a few is what just turned the classroom into a killing jar of derision at them they’ve just fled - but nothing will return the humanity that was just sucked out of that room.
The standard metric for measuring written English clarity in science is called Hemingway. I assume that’s because he worked hard to write clear, simple, concrete prose, rather than ending up alone with his cats, a bottle of rum, and a shotgun.
Thursday, March 13, 2025
Motel
Monday, March 10, 2025
The reason it’s a cliché is because it’s true, Lloyd Cole sung, clunkily. But the cliché is also true, like mirrors facing each other, infinitely reflecting each other, or a fractal. And none more cliched than American motels. Neon signs, a strip of single storey down at heel rooms at the back with cars parked in front, a crumbling swimming pool with the hint of algae, the simmering highway roaring past a few feet away.
Finished reading: Don’t Point That Thing at Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli 📚
PG Wodehouse on a bad day pastiching Raymond Chandler. Still wittier than most allegedly ‘humorous’ thrillers though, and an appealingly nasty darkness.
Think public involvement is just a tick-box exercise? So did a lot of the researchers whose grants got rejected. Here’s how to actually get funded: bit.ly/ppiefundi…
Finished reading: Lucifer’s Banker by Bradley C. Birkenfeld 📚
Messianic blowhard international banker turns dickwaving/self pitying whistleblower after his employers clip his self aggrandising ego. Worth reading for the epic lack of self awareness.
The secret grants panels won’t tell you… Many applications are rejected for bad public involvement plans. Not the science. Not the budget. Just how you involve the public. Most researchers treat it like paperwork. Here’s how to play the game — and win: bit.ly/ppiefundi…
Want to know the one thing that could make or break your next research grant? (Hint: It’s not your methods or budget.) Too many applications fail on public engagement — but almost no one talks about how to do it well. Here’s how to stand out: bit.ly/ppiefundi…
Public involvement is the most underrated skill in clinical research. It’s not just a box to tick — it’s how you get funded. Many rejected grants fail on this… but most researchers treat it like an afterthought. Do it properly, and outshine the competition. Here’s how: bit.ly/ppiefundi…
Butterflies
Friday, March 7, 2025
You wouldn’t look twice at the Butterflies Of The Night. The secret of their international dominance has been keeping it drab. Even their outer clothing is matte, as though absorbing light and reflecting none back. You have been surrounded by them and never noticed, I guarantee. When the emergency services roll up after one of their kinetic operations, nobody remembers them. Their operations have led to great wealth and power but it’s never used showily or gaudily.
Fishing
Thursday, March 6, 2025
The winches at the back of the Jerry’s boat creak and haul the net into the stern, and Jerry’s eyes are pinned on the winch, his hand tight on the throttle lever, his breath tight in his chest. Finally the net’s all reeled in, except for its end coiled up in a layered tube, like a bright orange mermaid. We stare at it, shifting our balance as the boat bobs, listening to the waves slapping on the hull, frozen.
Just watching the Trump Not State Of The Union. Do you think Americans understand what a bunch of thick twats they come across as when they chant ‘USA USA USA’?
Family
Monday, March 3, 2025
He knows where each stair creaks, whether it will groan when his foot hits the left, the right, or the middle, as he creeps slowly down from his bedroom. Through the living room door at the bottom, he maps the peaks and crevasses of his parents’ war. Or worse, he hears nothing but the burning fuse of silence, fizzing like a cartoon bomb. The only question is which shrapnel sliver will lodge underneath his skin This is family.
Finished reading: Fire Weather by John Vaillant 📚
Scary and inclusive, with a nice linking of the fire’s voraciousness with the oil industry’s greed.
Saloon
Sunday, March 2, 2025
Amongst the increasing dross on Substack, there’s someone putting up a word each day as the prompt for a 100-word ‘story’. Plot’s pretty limited at that length, but there’s room for brief character sketches. Here’s a first bash. “Saloon to the left. Snug to the right. No handsome dangerous cowboys here, just a grubby arse pub in the Midlands. Hers for the last thirty years. She opens the door every day with her soul dribbling out of her like the clogged-prostate drip of piss she’ll find miama’d over the floor of the gents later.
I was never lost on boyhood bike rides, until I got home
Sunday, March 2, 2025
As a child, I never got lost when I was out. That only happened once I got home.