Something a bit different. I go for cycles more than I do walks, and the back roads of East- and Midlothian are my usual haunts. I've explored some of the old coal mining region in a previous post. A ride on a road bike is necessarily restricted to roads, because you can't branch off onto … Continue reading Esk Valley & Moorfoots: a ride
Any discussion of Yukio Mishima's life and work has to deal, at some point, with his death. A right-wing nationalist appalled by the Western influence on Japanese society and culture, he tried to lead his own personal militia in a coup. It failed and Mishima immediately committed seppuku - ritual suicide - before (following the … Continue reading The Japanese Proust? Yukio Mishima
The Beltane issue of 'Weird Walk' (reviewed here) went to several print runs and is now unavailable. As I write, this Samhain issue is already on a second run, so this tidy little zine has evidently struck a chord. What does issue 2 bring us? Well, more content for a start: we now have 48 … Continue reading Zine review: ‘Weird Walk’ #2
"At last, the night has a hero" - Cabal strapline. I've written elsewhere about the anticipation my friends and I felt in the months before the release of Clive Barker's second feature film Nightbreed in the autumn of 1990. Not that we got to see it: an unimpressive box-office in America meant it only got … Continue reading At last…Clive Barker’s ‘Nightbreed’ (1990/2014)
Momentum is everything. It's a long time since I posted anything about my own writing. It's definitely taken a back seat since I started this blog, but this year I've written two short stories and most of a novella. How has it gone? *** Firstly, the two short stories. I grew up in a small … Continue reading #AmWriting
Just 6 months after the superb volume 3 of Tales from the Shadow Booth (which I reviewed here), "the international journal of weird and eerie fiction", Dan Coxon brings us another. And its just as good: that's all you really need to know. But if you want more, read on... It begins, as all trips … Continue reading Review: “Tales from the Shadow Booth: Volume 4”
In a previous post I described my adolescent fascination with military aircraft. Among the many books and magazines I owned was a 1950s hardback picked up for 10p at a jumble sale. I Flew With Braddock was - to my naive mind - the biographical tale of a maverick RAF Bomber Command pilot called Matt … Continue reading Braddock!
In a previous post I looked at the increasing importance of, and focus on, the natural world in Kathleen Jamie's poetry throughout her career. With hindsight, the two essay collections she has written - 2012's Sightlines and it's 2006 predecessor, Findings (surely one of the finest books of the century so far) - seem to … Continue reading Kathleen Jamie: “Surfacing”
"Yes, he was looking back, because nowadays he had forgotten who he had been when he was young." Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting This post follows loosely from one I wrote two years ago, about nostalgia. I found the quote above while re-reading Kundera for the first time since I was about … Continue reading Shedding skins / counting rings
The plen-an-gwarry (or plain-an-gwarry) is where several of my interests collide: early modern drama, Cornwall, (more or less) ancient sites, and language. What are they? The plen-an-gwarrys are circular earthworks - amphitheatres - where, among other communal events, medieval dramas were performed. These would have borne a resemblance to the contemporary English passion plays and … Continue reading Cornwall: Plen-an-gwarry
Into the Gyre 