littorally

Serendipities

Things that I have discovered recently that make me happy.

New (to me) music, from The Notwist and The Shortwave Set.

Grasmere gingerbread. Hot. Especially after a couple of drinks.

This post about probably the most intensive Masters in Creative Writing, which gives a real grounding in the skills and experience needed.

Born from a roiling vat of the seething discontents and sociopathic urges of the commenters to the BBC’s ‘Have Your Say’ website: the Twat-O-Tron. None of the comments are made up. None of them. Make plans to flee now: I suggest the Moon.

Pope is Catholic, mandarins announce

The Foreign Secretary has recommended to the Queen that Robert Mugabe’s honorary knighthood, given in 1994, be withdrawn by the Queen, because apparently it turns out it has suddenly become apparent that he’s really something of a nasty chap.

In other news from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office today, travel restrictions to Eastern Europe and Central Asia, in place due to the threat from the Mongol hordes, have now been lifted.

In a hotel in Amsterdam

We were messing around doing iTunes playlists when Lost Weekend by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions came on, and I mentioned that whenever I think of Lloyd Cole these days (which is not often, in case that makes me sound like a stalker) I always just see Jimmy Carr. Only to find out that I’m not the only one, which makes me feel better.

In other news, the next novel is well and truly started, and I have that sense of compulsion and excitement about it which I haven’t had with any of the ideas I’ve been playing with, that feeling that you’re lost in it, that it’s in your head all day, working on it or not. Which is good.

Disturbance at the Heron Tree

Based in the old naval yards on the Isle of Nantes, the workshops of Les Machines de l’ile, producers of the Elephant. There’s a carousel planned, a 25 metre carousel that will have 27 moving marine creatures including the Giant Squid. And a 28 metre high Heron Tree, which is gradually coming into existence.

(via Mefi).

You Are Not The Ref Anymore

Shoot Magazine is dead.

I spent a good chunk of my childhood in the seventies reading about how hard-faced weathered men with bad hair and worse beards liked to eat steak and chips before a match. Or maybe chicken, if they were progressive and in tune with fancy dan cutting edge foreign sports science. I’d sit for hours, contented, eating Angel Delight and rearranging the little tabs in the league ladders.

A Guardian obit quotes the best answer ever in the regular Shoot questionnaire. When Alan Birchenall of Leicester City was asked which person in the world he would most like to meet, the answer was:

Hitler (if still alive) – or Neil Diamond.

Class.

More good news

After so long spent wrestling with long fiction, it’s good to have my short story mojo working again. Following the other week’s sale to Hitchcock’s, Michael Kelly’s now taken a story of mine for an anthology which will feature some great writers like Joel Lane and Steve Duffy.

Market forces

Last week I had to go to a conference in Leeds. I had half an hour to kill before it started, and wandered around the area, ending up in an indoor market. And it struck me, while I was there, that there is actually only one indoor market in England. OK, it might seem as if there is one in most towns, but they are really just trans-dimensional gateways that all lead into the same ur-market.

Walk in any door, and you are in the same place.

It is full of stalls that sell sewing machine parts, and jigsaws with a thousand pieces, wedding cake decorations and every kind of battery that you can think of and many that you can’t, a tool for every job, albeit one that will fall to pieces when you are half way through it, wool, ribbons, and ribbony wool and woolly ribbons, diamante cases for mobile phones and unlocking services only ten quid, the smell of frying eggs, Irish music cassettes including every Daniel O’Donnell album ever made and some he probably didn’t, butchers that you’re not sure you’d want to buy meat from that use those tinted lights to make the greying meat look redder, cheap trainers, curtains and nets and venetian blinds and roller blinds and those sideways ones that no-one knows the name of, sweets in plastic jars, birthday cards made of the flimsiest cardstock ever invented, bath-mats with football team crests on, camouflage trousers and jackets and fluorescent hi-viz waistcoatsm food for hamsters and flea combs for cats and cheerful cafes and buttons, buttons, lots of buttons, everywhere buttons.

28 good, 42 bad

There’s been a lot made this week about David Davis’ principled resignation from the Shadow Cabinet and from Parliament, so he can fight a bye-election against himself. And maybe Kelvin Mackenzie. Which given that in a bye-election fought between Kelvin Mackenzie and Satan, Mackenzie would lost his deposit, isnt’t turning out to be that much of a stand.

And if you look more closely at Davis, it’s not turning out to be that principled, either. For sure, I agree with much of what he’s saying now. No to 42 days internment without charge. The insidious spread of CCTV, and the uses to which its being put. The attempts to introduce compulsory ID by stealth. Ever-expanding DNA databases of people who have committed no crime. The appalling misuse of laws passed to protect freedom and fight the terrorists who as we know are RIGHT BEHIND YOU, RIGHT NOW, laws used to arrest people reading poetry outside Parliament or shouting tremulously at a Labour Party Conference. All very good stuff, and all bang on the money over the chipping away at liberty which has been the hallmark of this government.

“Up until yesterday, I took the view that what we did in the House of Commons, representing our constituents, was a noble endeavour because we defended the freedoms of the British people.”

Sounds good, hey. But I find it hard to get behind Davis the crusader. Perhaps it’s because, despite all his impassioned defiance of the extension of detention without charge to 42 days, he voted for the extension to 28 days.

“We acknowledge that the world has changed since the IRA halted its terror campaign. New technology brings new security challenges. As the Home Secretary said in relation to the National Technical Assistance Centre, the police and security services need more time to scour CCTV footage and to crack encrypted messages. The international dimension of Islamist terrorism also brings new challenges. That is why my hon. Friends made it clear in Committee that we agree with the Government that the current 14-day limit is too brief and propose its extension to 28 days.”

The sacred point at which this all becomes an unwarrantable crushing of liberty, insult to the magna carta, blah blah blah, must presumably lie at some point between 29 and 42, then. For voting yes to 28 days using the same arguments the government are using now, but throwing his toys out of the pram over an extension to 42, Davis is a hypocrite.

I also find it hard to rally to the call for freedom when the person making it is an enthusiast for the state killing people. It’s a bit rich for Davis to talk about mistakes made and the impact of innocent people imprisoned for 42 days when if he had his way innocent people would have been barbecued in the mercy seat - Stefan Kiszko, the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, Colin Stagg…if Davis had his choice, they’d all have been dead in the ground long, long before their innocence was proven.

Whether it’s Section 28, opposition to gay rights like equal age of consent and civil partnerships, or opposition to the Human Rights Act, Davis has long been on the side of those who would diminish freedom

All of which is why I find his recent conversion a little unconvincing.