After 15 years of wittering on Wordpress I’m moving over to scintillate on Substack. Or such is the plan. If you’ve been around a while, firstly thank you for following me over to my new habitat, and secondly you will know by now that my plans are often vague guidelines that get ripped up or steamrollered within moments. However, the plan right now is to post every Sunday, with at least one longer format per month, and the other Sundays may feature some of the fancy new tools I have available like audio, or getting a discussion going.
I recently turned 45 and decided it was as good a time as any for a new venture. Not decisive enough to make an actual fresh start, I imported the August 2008-May 2023 posts from my old blog into the archive here, then weeded out the ones that were obviously short-lived or no longer relevant. Feel free to dive in, comment, question etc. Lots of them are book reviews so you may come out of it with an extended To Read list. You can thank me later.
Since May I’ve mainly been writing Series 2 Episode 1 of Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays, which ought to be out in December, and reading history books (Chartist risings in and around Bradford, and a history of coal-mining, among others).
I’ve also read and greatly enjoyed The Stranger Times by CK McDonnell which is a sort of dark comic fantasy mystery set in Manchester. The Stranger Times is a hopeless newspaper of the weird and unexplained, but when some of the weirdness is close to home they remember the phrase ‘investigative journalism’. If you like early (pre-steampunk) Robert Rankin, or Ben Aaronovitch you’ll probably enjoy this and it is the start of a series.
That’s all till next time. Thanks for dropping by.