David O'Rourke's blog

Thumbs-up for Scrivener support

2013-07-10T16:09:00.000+01:00

The thing was, the free-write started out as a short story; then it grew into something of novel proportions. For some reason, I started a new project when I realised this. I now required these parts merged seamlessly into one Scrivener project, so that I could tweak and manipulate the whole thing. I emailed support, and they were back with a clear solution in a matter of hours. Well done Scrivener!

Reading list

2013-05-15T18:20:00.003+01:00

Reading a lot of text books on narrative theory at the moment. Need to read more fiction and indeed write more. Getting there. A visit to warmer climes might help with the creative juices.

Favourite writers

2012-08-07T00:43:00.002+01:00

Relaxing on the Nothe spectator area in Weymouth after watching the sailing Olympics, I fell into conversation with an engaging (and attractive) english lit graduate who asked me who were my favourite authors. My mind suddenly went blank - like someone who's been slapped across the face with a wet fish and is too stunned to answer. I have now retreated, regrouped and examined my conscience - as the Catholics say. At the top of the list, I'd place myself of course: patchy, but not bad when on form (I jest). Below that, the order keeps changing. At the moment. it includes James Joyce, John Updike - in spite of the late Gore Vidal's hatred of him, Philip Roth, Raymond Chandler, Haruki Murakami, Herman Melville, WG Sebald, Cormac McCarty, John McGahern, Frank O'Connor, Roddy Doyle, Colm Toibin, Maeve Binchy, Martin Amis, Ruth Rendell, Lorrie Moore, Zadie Smith (a friend - I was listed in the 'Compliments' as one of the first readers of On Beauty), Ali Smith, Citizen Smith (!), Charles Dickens, DH Lawrence, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Fernando Pessoa, and others that I must have forgotten. Not one for reading one author to the exclusion of all others, I've read more Murakami recently than any other author. I still can't make up my mind about his work, which is about the best compliment I can pay - I value ambivalence. I did mention a Dickens and one or two others. She said 'in that case. you must read Balzac'. I shall, as soon as I finish this Amis, I'll try a sample of his work- if there are any libraries still open then. The list will of course change regularly.

Of particular interest to me was the fact that this young Romanian wrote her dissertation on Frank McCourt's 'Angela's Ashes'. As it happens, I had a long and wide-ranging chat with Frank at a friends's book launch (Nick Laird) in London about six months before Frank died. I was really taken with Frank's natural warmth and humanity and was very sad to learn of his subsequent passing.

Earthquake off Ireland's west coast

2012-06-28T11:30:00.000+01:00

Earthquake off coast of Mayo on Ireland's west coast

Next generation iPhone pictures

2012-06-28T11:20:00.000+01:00

Next generation iPhone photos here

Synopsis of Zadie Smith's novel 'NW'

2012-06-23T18:24:00.000+01:00

'North West London comes vividly to life in this new novel by the author of the bestselling White Teeth and Man Booker-shortlisted On Beauty. This is the story of a city. The north-west corner of a city. Here you'll find guests and hosts, those with power and those without it, people who live somewhere special and others who live nowhere at all. And many people in between. Every city is like this. Cheek-by-jowl living. Separate worlds. And then there are the visitations: the rare times a stranger crosses a threshold without permission or warning, causing a disruption in the whole system. Like the April afternoon a woman came to Leah Hanwell's door, seeking help, disturbing the peace, forcing Leah out of her isolation . . . Zadie Smith's brilliant tragi-comic new novel follows four Londoners - Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan - as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their London is a complicated place, as beautiful as it is brutal, where the thoroughfares hide the back alleys and taking the high road can sometimes lead you to a dead end. Depicting the modern urban zone - familiar to town-dwellers everywhere - Zadie Smith's NW is a quietly devastating novel of encounters, mercurial and vital, like the city itself.'

Niamh Cusack on James Joyce's Ulysses

2012-06-16T12:42:00.000+01:00

North West London Blues by Zadie Smith

2012-06-03T12:55:00.000+01:00

The North West London Blues

Zadie Smith

The Victorian Society

An 1894 drawing of Willesden Green Library

Last time I was in Willesden Green I took my daughter to visit my mother. The sun was out. We wandered down Brondesbury Park towards the high road. The “French Market” was on, which is a slightly improbable market of French things sold in the concrete space between the pretty turreted remnants of Willesden Library (1894) and the brutal red brick beached cruise ship known as Willesden Green Library Centre (1989), a substantial local landmark that racks up nearly five hundred thousand visits a year. We walked in the sun down the urban street to the concrete space—to market. This wasn’t like walking a shady country lane in a quaint market town ending up in a perfectly preserved eighteenth-century square. It was not even like going to one of these Farmer’s Markets that have sprung up all over London at the crossroads where personal wealth meets a strong interest in artisanal cheeses.

But it was still very nice. Willesden French Market sells cheap bags. It sells CDs of old time jazz and rock ‘n’ roll. It sells umbrellas and artificial flowers. It sells ornaments and knick-knacks and doo dahs, which are not always obviously French in theme or nature. It sells water pistols. It sells French breads and pastries for not much more than you’d pay for the baked goods in Gregg’s down Kilburn High Road. It sells cheese, but of the decently priced and easily recognizable kind—brie, goat’s, blue—as if the market has traveled unchanged across the channel from some run-down urban suburb of Paris. Which it may have done for all I know.

The key thing about Willesden’s French Market is that it accentuates and celebrates this concrete space in front of Willesden Green Library Centre, which is at all times a meeting place, though never quite so much as it is on market day. Everybody’s just standing around, talking, buying or not buying cheese, as the mood takes them. It’s really pleasant. You could almost forget Willesden High Road was ten yards away. This matters. When you’re standing in the market you’re not going to work, you’re not going to school, you’re not waiting for a bus. You’re not heading for the tube or shopping for necessities. You’re not on the high road where all these activities take place. You’re just a little bit off it, hanging out, in an open air urban area, which is what these urban high streets have specifically evolved to stop people doing.

Everybody knows that if people hang around for any length of time in an urban area without purpose they are likely to become “anti-social.” And indeed there were four homeless drunks sitting on one of the library’s strange architectural protrusions, drinking Special Brew. Perhaps in a village they would be sitting under a tree, or have already been driven from the area by a farmer with a pitchfork. I do not claim to know what happens in villages. But here in Willesden they were sat on their ledge and the rest of us were congregating for no useful purpose in the unlovely concrete space, simply standing around in the sunshine, like some kind of community. From this vantage point we could look ahead to the turrets, or left to the Victorian police station (1865), or right to the half-ghostly façade of the Spotted Dog (1893).

We could have a minimal sense of continuity with what came before. Not so much as the people of Hampstead must have, to be sure, or the folk who live in pretty market towns all over the country, but here and there in Willesden the past lingers on. We’re glad that it does. Which is not to say that we are overly nostalgic about architecture (look at the library!) but we find it pleasant to remember that we have as much right to a local history as anyone, even if many of us arrived here only recently and from every corner of the globe.

On market day we permit ourselves the feeling that our neighborhood, for all its catholic mix of people and architecture, remains a place of some beauty that deserves minimal preservation and care. It’s a nice day out, is my point. Still, there’s only so long a toddler will stand around watching her grandmother greet all the many people in Willesden her grandmother knows. My daughter and I took a turn. You can’t really take a turn in the high road so we went backwards, into the library centre. Necessarily backward in time, though I didn’t—couldn’t—bore my daughter with my memories: she is still young and below nostalgia’s reach. Instead I will bore you. Studied in there, at that desk. Met a boy over there, where the phone boxes used to be. Went, with school friends, in there, to see The Pianoand Schindler’s List (cinema now defunct) and afterward we went in there, for coffee (café now defunct) and had an actual argument about art, an early inkling that there might be a difference between a film with good intentions and a good film.

Meanwhile my daughter is running madly through the centre’s esplanade, with another toddler who has the same idea. And then she reverses direction and heads straight for Willesden Green Book Shop, an independent shop that rents space from the council and provides—no matter what Brent Council, the local government for the London borough of Brent, may claim—an essential local service. It is run by Helen. Helen is an essential local person. I would characterize her essentialness in the following way: “Giving the people what they didn’t know they wanted.” Important category. Different from the concept popularized by Mr Murdoch: giving the people what they want. Everyone is by now familiar with the Dirty Digger’s version of the social good—we’ve had thirty years of it. Helen’s version is different and necessarily perpetrated on a far smaller scale.

Helen gives the people of Willesden what they didn’t know they wanted. Smart books, strange books, books about the country they came from, or the one that they’re in. Children’s books with children in them that look at least a bit like the children who are reading them. Radical books. Classical books. Weird books. Popular books. She reads a lot, she has recommendations. Hopefully, you have a Helen in a bookshop near you and so understand what I’m talking about. In 1999 I didn’t know I wanted to read David Mitchell until Helen pointed me toGhostwritten. And I have a strong memory of buying a book by Sartre here, because it was on the shelf and I saw it. I don’t know how I could have known I wanted Sartre without seeing it on that shelf—that is, without Helen putting it there. Years later, I had my book launch in this bookshop and when it got too full, mainly with local friends of my mother, we all walked up the road to her flat and carried on over there.

And it was while getting very nostalgic about all this sort of thing with Helen, and wondering about the possibility of having another launch in the same spot, that I first heard of the council’s intention to demolish the library centre along with the bookshop and the nineteenth-century turrets and the concrete space and the ledge on which the four drunks sat. To be replaced with private luxury flats, a greatly reduced library, “retail space” and no bookshop. (Steve, the owner, could not afford the commercial rise in rent. The same thing happened to his Kilburn Bookshop, which closed recently after thirty years. The old Kilburn Library has been a Sainsbury’s for some time.) My mum wandered in, with some cheese. The three of us lamented this change and the cultural vandalism we felt it represented. Or, if you take the opposite view, we stood around pointlessly, like the Luddite, fiscally ignorant liberals we are, complaining about the inevitable.

Oxyman/geograph.org.uk

A few days later I got back on a plane to New York, where I teach for a part of each year. Logically it should be easier, when a person is far away from home, to take bad news from home on the chin, but anyone who has spent time in a community of ex-pats knows the exact opposite is true: no-one could be more infuriated by events in Rome than the Italian kid serving your cappuccino on Broadway. Without the balancing context of everyday life all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad. Quickly you become hysterical. Consequently I can’t tell whether the news coming out of my home is really as bad as it appears to be, or whether objects perceived from three thousand miles away are subject to exaggerations of size and color. Did a Labour-run council really send heavies into Kensal Rise Library, in a dawn raid, to strip the place of books and Mark Twain’s wall plaque? Are the people of Willesden Green seriously to lose their bookshop, be offered a smaller library (for use by more patrons from other libraries Brent has closed), an ugly block of luxury flats— and told that this is “culture?” Yes. That’s all really happening. With minimal consultation, with bully-boy tactics, secrecy and a little outright deceit. No doubt Councillor Mo Butt (the council has closed) finds himself in a difficult position: the percentage cuts in Brent are among the highest in the country, mandated by central government. But the chronic mismanagement of finances is easily traced back to the previous Labour government, and so round and round goes the baton of blame. The Willesden Green plan as it stands so obviously gives the developers an extremely profitable land deal—while exempting them from the need to build social housing—that you feel a bit like a child pointing out. In this economy who but a child would expect anything else?

Reading these intensely local stories alongside the national story creates another effect that may be only another kind of optical illusion: mirroring. For here in the Leveson Inquiry into the “ethics of the British press” you find all the same traits displayed, only writ large. Minimal consultation, bully-boy tactics, secrecy, outright deceit. Are some of the largest decisions of British political life really being made at the private dinner tables of a tiny elite? Why is Jeremy Hunt, the secretary of state “for culture, Olympics, media, and sport,” texting Murdoch? What did Rebekah promise the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister promise Rebekah in that pretty little market town of Chipping Norton? During another period of ex-pat existence, in Italy, I sat at a Roman café table in a Renaissance square rolling my eyes at the soap opera of Italian political life: wire-tapped politicians and footballers and TV stars, backroom media deals, glaring conflicts of interest, tabloid culture run riot, politicians in the pockets of newspapers. I used to chuckle over la Repubblica and tease my Italian friends about the kind of problems we didn’t have in our basically sound British parliamentary democracy.

And so I recognize myself to be an intensely naïve person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight. And I retain a particular naivety concerning the British state, which must seem comical to many people, particularly younger people. I can only really account for it by reaching back again, briefly, into the past. It’s a short story about debt—because I owe the state, quite a lot. Some people owe everything they have to the bank accounts of their parents. I owe the state. Put simply, the state educated me, fixed my leg when it was broken, and gave me a grant that enabled me to go to university. It fixed my teeth (a bit) and found housing for my veteran father in his dotage. When my youngest brother was run over by a truck it saved his life and in particular his crushed right hand, a procedure that took half a year, and which would, on the open market—so a doctor told me at the time—have cost a million pounds. Those were the big things, but there were also plenty of little ones: my subsidized sports centre and my doctor’s office, my school music lessons paid for with pennies, my university fees. My NHS glasses aged 9. My NHS baby aged 33. And my local library. To steal another writer’s title: England made me. It has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt.

Things change. I don’t need the state now as I once did; and the state is not what it once was. It is complicit in this new, shared global reality in which states deregulate to privatize gain and re-regulate to nationalize loss. A process begun with verve by a Labour government is presently being perfected by Cameron’s Tory-Lib Dem coalition. The charming tale of benign state intervention described above is now relegated to the land of fairy tales: not just naïve but actually fantastic. Having one’s own history so suddenly and abruptly made unreal is an experience of a whole generation of British people, who must now wander around like so many ancient mariners boring foreigners about how they went to university for free and could once find a National Health dentist on their high street. I bore myself telling these stories. And the thing that is most boring about defending libraries is the imputation that an argument in defense of libraries is necessarily a social-liberal argument. It’s only recently that I had any idea that how a person felt about libraries—not schools or hospitals, libraries—could even represent an ideological split. I thought a library was one of the few sites where the urge to conserve and the desire to improve—twin poles of our political mind—were easily and naturally united. Besides, what kind of liberal has no party left to vote for, and feels not so much gratitude to the state as antipathy and, at times, fear?

The closest I can find myself to an allegiance or a political imperative these days is the one expressed by that old social democrat Tony Judt: “We need to learn to think the state again.” First and foremost I need to become less naïve. The money is gone, and the conditions Judt’s generation inherited and my generation inherited from Judt’s are unlikely to be replicated in my lifetime, if ever again. That’s the bad news from home. Politically all a social liberal has left is the ability to remind herself that fatalism is only another kind of trap, and there is more than one way to be naïve. Judt again: “We have freed ourselves of the mid-twentieth century assumption—never universal but certainly widespread—that the state is likely to be the best solution to any given problem. We now need to liberate ourselves from the opposite notion: that the state is—by definition and always—the worst possible option.”

Brent Green Party

A protest in front of the Willesden Green Library

What kind of a problem is a library? It’s clear that for many people it is not a problem at all, only a kind of obsolescence. At the extreme pole of this view is the technocrat’s total faith: with every book in the world online, what need could there be for the physical reality? This kind of argument thinks of the library as a function rather than a plurality of individual spaces. But each library is a different kind of problem and “the Internet” is no more a solution for all of them than it is their universal death knell. Each morning I struggle to find a seat in the packed university library in which I write this, despite the fact every single student in here could be at home in front of their macbook browsing Google Books. And Kilburn Library—also run by Brent Council but situated, despite its name, in affluent Queen’s Park—is not only thriving but closed for refurbishment. Kensal Rise is being closed not because it is unpopular but because it is unprofitable, this despite the fact that the friends of Kensal Rise library are willing to run their library themselves (if All Souls College, Oxford, which owns the library, will let them.) Meanwhile it is hard not to conclude that Willesden Green is being mutilated not least because the members of the council see the opportunity for a sweet real estate deal.

All libraries have a different character and setting. Some are primarily for children or primarily for students, or the general public, primarily full of books or microfilms or digitized material or with a café in the basement or a market out front. Libraries are not failing “because they are libraries.” Neglected libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides the excuse to close them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.

In the modern state there are very few sites where this is possible. The only others that come readily to my mind require belief in an omnipotent creator as a condition for membership. It would seem the most obvious thing in the world to say that the reason why the market is not an efficient solution to libraries is because the market has no use for a library. But it seems we need, right now, to keep re-stating the obvious. There aren’t many institutions left that fit so precisely Keynes’ definition of things that no one else but the state is willing to take on. Nor can the experience of library life be recreated online. It’s not just a matter of free books. A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.

I don’t think the argument in favor of libraries is especially ideological or ethical. I would even agree with those who say it’s not especially logical. I think for most people it’s emotional. Not logos or ethos but pathos. This is not a denigration: emotion also has a place in public policy. We’re humans, not robots. The people protesting the closing of Kensal Rise Library love that library. They were open to any solution on the left or on the right if it meant keeping their library open. They were ready to Big Society the hell out of that place. A library is one of those social goods that matter to people of many different political attitudes. All that the friends of Kensal Rise and Willesden Library and similar services throughout the country are saying is: these places are important to us. We get that money is tight, we understand that there is a hierarchy of needs, and that the French Market or a Mark Twain plaque are not hospital beds and classroom size. But they are still a significant part of our social reality, the only thing left on the high street that doesn’t want either your soul or your wallet.

If the losses of private companies are to be socialized within already struggling communities the very least we can do is listen to people when they try to tell us where in the hierarchy of their needs things like public space, access to culture, and preservation of environment lie. “But I never use the damn things!” says Mr. Notmytaxes, under the line. Sir, I believe you. However. British libraries received over 300 million visits last year, and this despite the common neglect of the various councils that oversee them. In North West London people are even willing to form human chains in front of them. People have taken to writing long pieces in newspapers to “defend” them. Just saying the same thing over and over again. Defend our libraries. We like libraries. Can we keep our libraries? We need to talk about libraries. Pleading, like children. Is that really where we are?

June 2, 2012

O'Rourke's Reel - played by Paddy Keenan

2012-04-28T01:38:00.002+01:00

Presumably composed in honour of the Ard-Ri (High King), O'Rourke

Jeffrey Eugenides on his new book The Marriage Plot

2012-04-11T13:17:00.000+01:00

Barney McKenna, founding member of The Dubliners RIP

2012-04-08T02:18:00.001+01:00

Barney McKenna, third left, with fellow Dubliners (from left) Ciarán Bourke, Bobby Lynch, John Sheahan and Ronnie Drew in 1965. Photograph: Brian Shuel/Getty

Barney McKenna, who has died aged 72, was the last surviving founding member of the Irish folk group the Dubliners. While Ronnie Drew's gravelly voice gave the band its memorable vocal sound, it was McKenna's playing of the tenor banjo, coupled with John Sheahan's fiddle, that gave the Dubliners their original instrumental quality. In the process, McKenna redefined the role of the banjo in Irish traditional music. His distinctive playing can be heard on the Dubliners' two UK hit singles in 1967, Seven Drunken Nights and Black Velvet Band, as well as on group favourites such as The Wild Rover and McAlpine's Fusiliers. When the Pogues brought the Dubliners back to the vanguard of Irish music in 1987, their joint recording of The Irish Rover has his banjo well to the fore. McKenna was born in Donnycarney, Co Dublin, and started to play the banjo because he could not afford a mandolin. He was rejected from the Irish army band because of his poor eyesight. In Dublin in the late 1950s and early 60s, there was just a handful of folk musicians, often playing informally in a variety of combinations. McKenna was initially a member of a short-lived group fronted by the uilleann piper Paddy Moloney, who cited that lineup as the first incarnation of the Chieftains. Meanwhile, Drew was asked by the actor John Molloy to perform at the Gate theatre in Dublin, and he invited McKenna to join him on stage. On Fridays, Drew and McKenna would meet Molloy at O'Donoghue's pub to get paid. One night, with the landlord's permission, they played some tunes in the bar. The music sessions became a regular event – a rarity in pubs at the time – and the two musicians were joined by Luke Kelly, newly returned from England, and Ciarán Bourke. Known as the Ronnie Drew Folk Group, they soon changed their name to the Dubliners. When RTÉ banned the band's bawdy single Seven Drunken Nights, the pirate station Radio Caroline helped propel it into the British charts. The group's hard-living, hard-drinking image was seemingly confirmed by album titles such as A Drop of the Hard Stuff (1967). Concert tours in the US led to further international touring for a band whose matching bushy beards made them immediately recognisable. McKenna was enormously influential and his GDAE tuning was copied by countless banjo players in Ireland and beyond, making it the standard for Irish music. The tuning was an octave below the fiddle, opening up the banjo to a wide range of traditional music. The broadcaster and banjo player Mick Moloney told me: "His very gentle, subtle picking style, along with the beautiful swing in his playing, were an absolute revelation to the Irish music scene." The Dubliners' concerts invariably included banjo solos from McKenna, such as, in recent years, The Maid Behind the Bar and The High Reel. In addition, McKenna played the mandolin and the melodeon. Throughout his 50 years with the Dubliners, McKenna made a vocal contribution to their concerts and albums on love and sea songs, often with minimal instrumental accompaniment. A favourite was John Conolly's Fiddler's Green. He was well known as a raconteur, both on and off stage, and his funny sayings became known as Barneyisms. Both Kelly and Bourke died in the 1980s. Drew, who died in 2008, had periods away from the band. New members joined, such as Seán Cannon and Eamonn Campbell. But it was McKenna – alongside Sheahan, who joined in 1964 – who provided the continuity in a band that defied the changing tastes of Irish traditional music to build a worldwide fanbase for the good-time, occasionally raucous, street songs of Dublin. McKenna had recently completed the Dubliners' 50th anniversary tour of England, as well as concerts in Germany and Dublin. In February, the band was presented with a lifetime achievement award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk awards. McKenna, with failing eyesight, looked frail but still performed with style. McKenna's wife, Joka, died in the 1980s. He is survived by his partner, Tina, his sister, Marie, and brother, Sean.
• Bernard Noel McKenna, folk musician, born 16 December 1939; died 5 April 2012.
Guardian

Michael Bloomberg's anti-smoking action

2012-03-23T09:43:00.001+00:00

Well done Michael Bloomberg for donating 220 million dollars to anti-smoking movements. OK, he's currently the Forbes 19th richest man in in the US and can easily afford the money, nonetheless this is a virtuous move on his part. The loss of life caused by the promoters of the vile habit of smoking is a major scandal of the past, and persists to the present day - where their worst excesses are perpetrated on the developing world. The tobacco companies' insipid corruption of youth by hooking them on their dangerous product; by making smoking seem 'cool' is nothing short of evil. How these legalised corporate and individual drug pedlars can be permitted to persist in taking the lives of millions of citizens of the globe year after year is a disgrace to governments and regulatory bodies and one that puts the smaller illegal drug trade into perspective. As one who has lost a close relative to lung cancer caused by smoking, I salute Mr Bloomberg both for his recent and less recent actions on this front.

Cliff Jumping in Howth

2012-03-22T12:06:00.000+00:00

HOWTH CLIFF JUMP from Raphael Van De Velde on Vimeo.

Howth, in case you didn't know is just around the corner, on the north side from Dublin Bay.

Photos of 'Wanda', Halmatic 30

2012-03-21T22:42:00.004+00:00

Wanda at her marina berth (The sails were being spring-cleaned)

Earlier in the day. Wineglass transom

and conventional (non-feathering) propeller. See also the previous post.

Visiting Greystones, County Wicklow Summer 2013

Video of similar boat

'Wanda' on her marina berth

2012-03-21T22:22:00.003+00:00

Wanda is a Halmatic 30 Mark II with a Bukh 20hp diesel engine. These boats are robust with a long keel configuration suitable for serious blue water cruising. Approximately 200 were built. There has been a strong demand for long keelers since the 1979 Fastnet Disaster where light, low displacement yachts were the main casualties. The Halmatic 30 is very similar to the iconic Nicholson 31 which Halmatic also moulded. The H30 is actually 29.5ft LOA while the Nich 31 is 31.5ft, so the Halmatic is a shade smaller, but spacious enough for most needs. I remember going for an impromptu sail in a Nich 31 one Saturday afternoon in the late Eighties. It was just the owner (a subsequent winner of the Ocean Cruising Club award) and me and the wind was pumping force 5-6. The racing fleet were fairly hard-pressed with crews all up on gunwales, while we were making steady progress reefed to one slab and leisurely quaffing Soave to leeward with autopilot engaged. That memory lingered and inspired me when the opportunity arose to sail on an example of the Nich's 'younger sister'.

Halmatic has constructed hulls for the RNLI and other discriminating clients. It still exists as part of Vosper Thorneycraft apparently. Check out 'Yachting Monthly''s review of this design. See also the next post.

Brent Council Public Vandalism in Willesden

2012-03-12T23:23:00.001+00:00

'Hold Fast'

2012-03-09T18:24:00.002+00:00

Passage making on the cheap
A great little movie about a bunch of friends finding a hulk of a cruising boat and sailing it from Fort Lauderdale to the Dominican Republic.

Hold Fast from Moxie Marlinspike on Vimeo.

Phillip Maddoc (U-boat commander) RIP

2012-03-05T14:40:00.000+00:00

Orla in White Heat

2012-03-04T12:31:00.000+00:00

Great to see Jessica Gunning land the plum role of Orla in BBC2's 'White Heat' - starting Thursday 8th March. The first episode was great and the Belfast accent sounded good to me. Jess and I were colleagues until recently. We chatted about writing and acting at the water cooler and just occasionally, about the day job...
One thing's for sure, in the highly unlikely event of the acting drying-up, there'll always be work for her in credit control and customer services.

Well done Waterstones' staff member!

2012-02-20T13:38:00.021+00:00

I was browsing in Waterstones' Richmond branch on Sunday afternoon. A woman customer enquired about the work of Hunter S Thompson from one of the members of staff. Well, what this guy didn't know about the 'gonzo' writer wasn't worth talking about! He relayed his knowledge in the most professional and engaging manner. The customer was clearly pleased. Nice one, Waterstones for engaging such congenial staff. He was 30-35 with dark beard; but I have found all their staff equally approachable and knowledgable. I can assure you, I am gaining no pecuniary advantage from this testimonial! It's so much more human, don't you think, to consult an assistant than just diving into questionable Wikipedia entries or skimming Amazon's even more questionable reviews. I didn't earwig any longer as the latest book by Yorkshire author, Ross Raisin caught my eye. (Raisin's work had been recommended to me by poet and short story writer Rosie Allabarton.)

Sh*t book reviewers say

2012-02-16T14:16:00.003+00:00

A yacht called Wanda

2012-02-14T13:51:00.008+00:00

Looking forward to sailing soon our new boat, Wanda - a Halmatic 30. The one in the photo is similar though Wanda has white topsides.
We launched her at the Marina on Friday 16 March. It went like clockwork, thanks to the highly efficient marina team there. The topsides have been polished, blue antifouling applied. The boat looks spanking new. Just need to service the Bukh 20hp engine and tidy the decks. Can't wait to go cruising.

Punch Brothers

2012-02-12T15:37:00.000+00:00

A fairly distinctive sound, I think

Short story problems

2012-02-11T18:59:00.001+00:00

I'm finding it difficult at the moment to work in this genre. I just ramble endlessly on a stream of consciousness vibe. Must be my age, or more likely, state of mind . Blah.

Willesden Library Centre

2012-01-28T15:51:00.000+00:00

Support the campaign to keep the Willesden Library Centre.