…has served to keep me from posting, going out, enjoying myself or indeed doing much of anything worth writing about here. How can a whole month disappear so quickly? Especially when it’s a day longer than normal? The attack has essentially been three pronged: two non-substitutable essays due for the OU degree, a tight work deadline combined with a confused scope which led to a manic few weeks at the day job, and finally a speculative submission to an anthology of fiction in an attempt to try and revitalise my rather stalled writing career.
I did manage to get out to the Iain Sinclair and Will Self Psychogeography talk at the V&A around the start of the month though. David Southwell writes a wonderful summary of the evening here, but needless to say it was a fascinating and inspiring discussion. I’ve seen both authors hold court before, and it was unusual to see Self so subdued, but I guess when Sinclair talks, the smart thing to do is listen and thank him for the privilege.
Thanks to JT I’ve been mostly watching the first two seasons of the magnificent Entourage, as well as revisiting a few old favourite box collections of stuff in order to get the girlfriend up to speed for purposes of watching more current material. In a remarkable development I’ve also actually found myself watching terrestrial British television again, albeit still outside of the normal schedules, thanks to the BBC’s iPlayer. Stuff I thought I’d like, like the new Mitchell and Webb, and Armstrong and Miller have been generally disappointing, and it’s actually my more experimental choices of schedule pilfering which are baring fruit. The BBC 3 supernatural comedy pilot Being Human was really rather good, despite the fact there is simply no conceivable way I can describe the premise without it sounding irrevocably shite, and whilst the documentary series Worlds of Fantasy has a fairly predictable focus on the Hogswarts and the Mount Dooms of the genre, it’s also devoted a whole half an hour to Meryvn Peake and had a fairly substantial segment on Alan Garner. Attenborough’s Life In Cold Blood has, of course, been required viewing.
Annoyingly, I appear to have a cold brewing at the back of my throat. It’s this initial stage of the infection I find the most wearing and it just seems to last longer the older I get. If i must be ill though, it’s not bad timing as I’m away to Cornwall for a week at Easter and I want any extant infectious agents brought to heel before then.
