I spent last week with an internet friend and fellow Bond fan, Frieda, in Glens Falls, New York. This is the part of the world where The Spy Who Loved Me (the book, which has nothing to do with sexy Russian agents, Union Jack parachutes or underwater lairs) is set, and Frieda is probably the Bond fandom's leading expert on it ( Read more... )

Felis Futura: An Anthology of Future Cats, published by Manawaker Studio, is "a collection of short stories, poems, and visual art depicting the various futures of humanity’s most fickle companion".

It includes my story For I Shall Consider My Cat J/FRY, about a monk and his robot cat navigating a post-climate-change near-future ( Read more... )

A nice thing about Malta is that it's so small, you can pack in a lot of sightseeing and still have a leisurely holiday. It's also very beautiful, so wherever you go you're unlikely to be disappointed or worry you've missed out on something great.

On the Monday, we visited the first in a series of locations from the two episodes of Remington ( Read more... )

The clocks went forward in the night, meaning I didn't wake up as ludicrously early as is usual on arrival in the US. I was happy to stay in bed until I heard people - and cats - moving about, whereupon I ventured downstairs for toast with peanut butter and grape jelly ( Read more... )

This week I found myself catsitting for two friends at once, which sounds like the basis of a comic novel but falls flat because there was absolutely no need to keep the details of one catsitting gig secret from the second cat owner and vice versa ( Read more... )

I did a stint of catsitting over the weekend, for friends who live a couple of streets away. The first time I dropped round to replenish the food bowl, I didn't manage to deactivate the burglar alarm in time and had to crash around looking for the light switch while it shrieked. Filled with visions of my friends' holiday getting interrupted by ( Read more... )

Today - Monday, and Martin Luther King Day - was the day we parted from Kate and Tom and upped sticks to, well, the sticks: Pleasant Hill, a community east of San Francisco and reachable on the BART light rail. Here one of my longtime forum friends and riding buddies, Jim, has made his home, having very sensibly fallen for a Californian he met on a ( Read more... )

One of the peculiarities of Calvin, the cat whom I'm sitting, is that after his owners' daughter was born, he started bringing them little presents - either because he felt neglected, or because he doubted their ability properly to provide for their offspring. These gifts have ranged from someone else's Christmas ham to a small bottle of bicycle ( Read more... )

Night watch at the Wash & Dry.


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I've been catsitting over in East London this week, hanging out with lozette's cat Smudge while she, lucky thing, was in Orlando ( Read more... )