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... )

I took advantage of the balmy afternoon to get some walking done - part pleasure, part Carnival research - up beyond Millenium Point; the canals near Fazeley Street. It was almost too warm for a peacoat. It turns out that what I've taken to be the River Rea for years is probably an overflow channel instead, but it doesn't affect anything I need to ( Read more... )

Birmingham Central Library closed today. It's an unlovely building - an inverted concrete ziggurat, a lot of the time the lifts and escalators didn't work - but I liked it well enough. It was where I first went to my writers' group. There was a kind of central well you could look down into and watch the people walikng through Paradise Forum (which ( Read more... )

I managed to complete the first poem of this year, Navigations, at lunchtime after another dream of writing. Now I'm tapping local friends' brains on settings for the first Furze story. It'll be called Echo's Answer after the song by Broadcast, and needs, ideally, to be centred around an underpass in the city centre. The time setting is problematic ( Read more... )