Blog silence ends by tomorrow, I promise. Just getting – as they say – my shit back together after a traumatic week of proof reading / changing.
Meantime, Eris has joined us in the Valle – all the way from San Francisco – and has been busy blogging her whistlestop tour of London, the Valle and [...]

I’m still neck-deep in these proofs – reliving the last five years of my life, in painful detail – in the space of four days.
It all got a bit much on Thursday night and I decided to get very, very drunk indeed in the Valle. The alcohol here really is exceptionally affordable and, here, the [...]

A busy few days coming up. Or at least as busy as anyone can claim to be while swinging in a hammock in the mountains of Southern Spain.
Bea from Orion has just sent through the page proofs of the book – that is, the PDFs of the actual page layouts, as they’ll appear in print. [...]

“The Sixties were an era of extreme reality. I miss the smell of tear gas. I miss the fear of getting beaten.” – Hunter S. Thompson

Nostalgia is alive and well, and living in the past.
Last week, the two lead stories on BBC Online News Magazine concerned the apparently unrelated subjects of hell-raising and typewriters. The [...]

“Sad is the day that a Muslim is elected only because the press and others do not want to be called “racist” but he lived in Indonesia and attended muslim school, black americans back up always another black no matter who or what he did. It is o.k. to denigrate a woman like Mrs. Clinton [...]

After writing about Hunter S. Thompson earlier, I remembered something I wrote for the Guardian back in 2005, the week after he died.
Basically it was a call to arms to bloggers to take over the Gonzo mantle. To go pro.
It’s interesting, reading it back, how much has changed – and how little.
Certainly bloggers continue to [...]

Meeting Estelle Morris the other evening reminded me that I seem to be spending a lot of time at the moment surrounded by people who are much better academically qualified than me. People with doctorates in psychology or highly advanced computer scientists or lawyers who, unlike me, bothered to do something beyond their first degree.
It’s [...]

When I got rid of my Facebook account, I said there wasn’t anything I’d miss about having a profile there. I realised today that I was wrong. I miss the quotes section on my profile page.
I know quoting other people is the last refuge of a lazy mind, but I’m a big fan of the [...]

I know, I know. You’ve missed me. No, really, you have.
Since we last spoke, things have been a little mental, both in and out of the Valle. For a start we had guests at the villa. Girls, no less.
The catch is, I’ve promised not to blog about them, so you’ll just have to [...]