Will Self challenged those of us attending his Arvon masterclass to “take your readers by the hand and walk them through place and space with you.” After introducing us to some of literature’s great psychogeographers – Dorothy Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf, Thomas de Quincey – he walked us through a landscape …
My title paraphrases one of the best show titles of all time: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Did you know that this was in turn ripped off from an apocryphal Borscht Belt shaggy-dog joke? Well, so they say. I can’t actually find any source confirming …
There’s nothing like being in a foreign land to inspire one to cook some of the fine produce of the country. As I consider ‘D’, the next letter in the Picnic Game alphabet, I can’t help but laugh when I think of one of my closest calls with culinary disaster. …
The cats and I were busier than usual this past weekend. I, because I had real office-job-work to do all weekend, plus intermittent snow-shoveling. They, because it was the Great Backyard Bird Count and they had to brush up their ornithology. (Good thing I keep a handsome leatherette Audubon guide …
