I’ve been rediscovering simple pleasures lately - cottage pie, watching films in bed (thanks to my new free TV/video), sober conversation (that is to say, conversation while sober), mopping, good coffee, reading and of course writing.
I think there’s also a lot to be said about simple pleasures, but writ large. Things like Richard’s decision [...]

Got to rush out, but keen to keep my promise-to-self to blog near enough daily. Thank God, then, for Haiku...
Three thousand words typedMade myself laugh with a jokeSad but heartening
Right - off to Bafta to talk about things in common.

Last night was Richard’s 30th birthday and in an inspired move, he’d hired the Soho Hotel’s screening room for a private showing of The Breakfast Club - a film I’ve seen the beginning of a dozen times, but never the ending. And, oh boy was it good, even more so in the leathered comfort of [...]

Word counts are not necessarily a good way to track progress. They encourage churning out words, rather than actually writing them. Which kind of worked for the Second Life book, but not so much for this one.
But nonetheless, the fact that - with a target of 1500 words a day - I’ve just saved [...]

Today marked the official start of Operation Write Like A Mother.
I’m pretty much researched out now, and I’ve got a nice wall full of structural Post-It notes. All that remains now is to commit some 60,000 words to paper between now and 2nd January. Just north of 1500 publishable words a day. What could [...]

So, 4am and a total write off of a day, all told.
A lot of dicking about on Facebook, some cooking (I made cottage pie for one. It was, as they say, bad ass) and very little else. I did get to read the first half of Ruth’s screenplay though, which is really good. I won’t [...]

Well, I fell spectacularly off the ‘not drinking this month’ wagon last night. I may not have started ’til 10 but by four AM, by God was I there. And to think it was all going so well.
As a result today I’ve mainly been sleeping, eating and dicking about on the web. Drinking really [...]

“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”
- Oscar Wilde
So here it is, happy Thanksgiving.
There’s very little in my life - all of our lives, I suppose, but at the moment it feels like particularly mine - that isn’t affected one way or another by Americans. [...]

You know what I love?
Right! I love writing haiku.
That’s why this is one.
Haiku - as you know - is a form of Japanese poetry, consisting (usually) of three lines, with 5-7-5 syllables respectively.
I first stumbled across it in secondary school where my English teacher, Mr Coen, insisted we spend an hour writing [...]

More trouble at the treasury tonight after “Chancellor” Alistair Darling admitted that staff at HM Revenue and Customs had used normal internal mail to post records of every one of the UK’s Child Support claimants to the National Audit office. And now they’re missing.
The records - contained on two CDs - contained the names, [...]

“Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.“
-Christopher Fry
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Last week I caught up with a friend of mine who knows more about American TV than is probably healthy. She is what you might call an ‘expert’. We ended having something of a tepid debate about The West Wing.
I [...]

“Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard; live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.”
- Mary Schmich (Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young)
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Earlier on, I was round at a friend’s house, swapping my ability to change lightbulbs and plug [...]

“The easiest thing to do on earth is not write”
- William Goldman
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In ten days’ time, this blog will celebrate its first birthday. A cake will be baked, streamers will be unfurled and all assembled will sing a little birthday song.
And then will come the customary ‘looking back’. How much has changed in the [...]