Longtime readers will know I've had a fascination with the Mari Lwyd for a few years now, even going so far as to write a poem about her (which Strange Horizons were good enough to publish). Well, I've actually met my obsession at last ( Read more... )

I went back to my parents' yesterday and didn't do much more than read a huge chunk of Brian Catling's The Vorrh, which is extraordinary, a kind of Heart of Darkness for the twenty-first century, I got a text from fade_2_black later than I should, but wandered out to meet her for the last hour at The Boat. The moon was bright enough to light the road, somewhat ( Read more... )

I'm not long back from a week in the West Country with cybermule (H)! She met me off the coach and we took her son to Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. Predictably we didn't get much past the geology and biology sections. I looked at a stuffed yellowhammer and remembered the little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese call I used to hear in the fields around my parents ( Read more... )

I've sat on this one a little longer, but I can now announce my second story sale of the summer! My weird tale "Imago" will appear in  the Swan River Press anthology Uncertainties: Volume II, coming out in August: here are more details."Imago" itself is a pretty old story of mine, dating back to about '99 or 2000 (it's had a good polishing since ( Read more... )

I aten't dead! Been down in the West Country the last few days, staying with cybermule (H). She picked me up from the fringes of Birmingham Pride Saturday afternoon and we drove south after seeing a friend of hers who had the most beautiful tortoiseshell cat, rescued from Greece. Sunday we went into the Cotswolds, hoping to walk up to the long barrow of ( Read more... )

Happy belated Beltane to them as celebrates it! I got back from seeing cybermule (H) in Bristol last night. I read Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests on the coach down. I kept looking up and there were rookeries, then globes of mistletoe, in the trees lining the motorway. It wasn't always easy to tell the two apart, until the rooks lifted from the branches. H ( Read more... )

For our second date cybermule (I'll call her H from now on) spirited me away to the Peak District. Snow was coming down as we came into Cheshire, where we stopped for a while at Jodrell Bank. The weather was too bad for us to give it a proper visit, alas. But there was something apt in the way the observatory's dish blended with the flat-pewter sky. The ( Read more... )

Yesterday I said goodbye to gizmometer at Birmingham Airport after ten days together. It hurt, and I miss them, but I don't want to write about that. Have some scattershot memories instead ( Read more... )

Three things happen today. I'm forty-three! Saving full celebrations until Saturday: Balti and drinks with Martin, fade_2_black, and John H; quiet drinks with Fade tonight. I bought myself a fobwatch, some tiedyed jeans and new-to-me Converse (two of which I'm wearing now); got some copies of a journal called Boat from M, each issue dedicated to a different ( Read more... )

The Necronomicon (or at least the seventies cash-in that purports to be the Real Thing) came into the shop last Friday. So I took this and The Best of Saki back home with me. So far nothing nothing more eldritch has happened here apart from a mislaid rucksack and a diced onion turned to shrapnel on the kitchen floor (the resulting skid-dance was ( Read more... )