100 Push-ups a day: wrap up

Alex — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 15:11:40 +0000

I achieve my target!!! It’s done. One hundred a day, for a month. Three thousand push-ups. Honestly, you would not recognise me now, what with my powerful, overdeveloped forearms. I look back in awe at the pessimism of the early stages. It turns out that my sister’s advice was right – they do get a […]

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I agree to do 100 push-ups a day, to cure cancer.

Alex — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 15:30:35 +0000

One week in. This is an out-of-the-blue update, as I have agreed to do 100 push-ups a day, in order to cure cancer. And whilst – given the current economic debacle – I wasn’t particularly actively seeking money for it, a few very kind people have been kind enough to sponsor me. And the least […]

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I have a new privacy policy!!!

Alex — Wed, 16 May 2018 05:57:34 +0000

The European government has decided a thing called GDPR. I stare at it in some alarm. I am more of a ‘big picture creative’ type person than an ‘attention to detail’ type person, as anybody who has been on the motorway in a car driven by me will attest. The words dance around the explanatory […]

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Frédéric Debreu: live in Cheshire

Alex — Tue, 30 Jan 2018 10:12:04 +0000

I've been out and about a bit in 2018. A brand new hour-long talk/show about Sex & Bowls, Private Secret Diary, the early days of British Blogging and Generally Becoming a Writer seems to have gone down well on its first outing; being one of the 'authors in residence' at the inaugural RedDoor memoir writers' […]

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Big news: it’s Frederic Debreu – the album

Alex — Wed, 22 Nov 2017 12:32:05 +0000

I’m over the moon – and still a bit gobsmacked – to announce the release of the very first CD of Frederic Debreu’s songs.That’s eleven selected works from the great master himself, translated into English, performed and produced by the artists behind Jake Thackray’s album of ‘lost songs’. It's fronted by the terrific John Watterson, […]

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School visit, or ‘I become a failed bear.’

Alex — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 10:27:15 +0000

As an author, school visits help build an audience. They encourage new young readers, they build bridges with parents, they add to the cultural life of the nation. The Society of Authors has pages of guidance on how to conduct a successful author visit: from ideas, to legalities, to the basics of what and how […]

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A summary of events.

Alex — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 11:26:54 +0000

I’m not updating this very often at all. Which was always the plan, in that I kind of retired from blogging. And as a write a little more in other spheres, I’ve tried to find other hobbies that don’t involve sitting at a PC thinking about words. Thing is, Twitter has revealed that you only […]

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On Leonard Cohen, and music before words

Alex — Mon, 14 Nov 2016 14:19:21 +0000

This is in danger of becoming a music blog, but if people WILL keep dying and/or enjoying spectacular critical revivals then that’s the way it’ll have to be. The world has lost a genuine great with Leonard Cohen’s death. In some way the situation is very dissimilar to Bowie’s death, in that it had seemed […]

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The Lost Will and Testament of Jake Thackray

Alex — Fri, 07 Oct 2016 13:24:36 +0000

You know that thing many felt about David Bowie? I felt it when Jake Thackray died. I won’t overplay this: it wasn’t the utter loss and grief of the uber-fan. More an unexpected wash of upset, startlingly so, given that I was fairly convinced that I wasn’t the sort of person to be affected by […]

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“So she slammed the tailgate, but unfortunately that thrust the canoe forwards through the windscreen…”

Alex — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 13:43:26 +0000

It is a shame about Narcoleptic Dave’s car. The occasional incident like that makes me miss writing JonnyB’s diary. Fortunately, this sort of thing is quite rare in the village these days: a few years on and we are all quite sensible. We didn’t even manage the village outing to the punk weekender this year. […]

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