Being shelled, the way I was shelled, was a bit like having high explosive hiccups. There was a long enough pause between each blast to make me wonder if that last one was the last one. But then it wasn’t and I was dunked back into flinching, cringing terror. It happened again and again. Over the course of an hour or so I came to understand how this breaks minds: nothing to fight and nowhere to run, even my fear was useless. If I really, honestly, believed in God I would have known it then because I would have been praying, out loud, without shame. Instead all I could think about was luck. Our attackers would have been outrageously lucky to hit us, but luck can be quite outrageous sometimes…
Being bombarded
Black Swan Green 4/5
This is the second book by David Mitchell that I have read and loved, the first being Cloud Atlas. Black Swan Green is a coming of age story set in an English community, halfway between town and countryside, at the time of the Falklands War. To me that description sounds dull as ditchwater but the quality of Mitchell’s writing carries you through it, painting a picture of a boy who is both ordinary and extraordinary living a life that is both pedestrian but also fast-changing. Events make constant seamless switches between magical and banal until you realise that the world is not one thing or the other but inextricably both. This is a very clever writer.
An encounter with Tony Blair
TONY BLAIR was waiting for me in Downing Street. Me and some others. And actually he probably wasn’t waiting, he was probably doing stuff. He was Prime Minister after all. But we were due to chat, at his invitation, about the forthcoming Mayoral election in London. Labour’s first choice of candidate, Red Ken Livingstone, had gone unofficial and Labour had pushed Frank Dobson forward to make some semblance of a fight of it. Tony had arranged some face time with journalists as part of the Labour charm offensive and I, as London Metro’s man in the right place at the right time, had been selected to do the interview. It was a bit of an honour: certainly the only world leader I would be talking to that day and it had fallen into my lap.
Keeping it real with Debbie Harry at Camp Bestival 2011
ON FRIDAY night Debbie Harry was going to have to work hard to impress me.
Since MarilynMonroe each decade has thrown up its iconic blondes: Twiggy in the Sixties, Madonna in the Eighties, Britney Spears in the Nineties. The Seventies gave us Ms Harry, frontwoman of the band Blondie.
Men of a certain age – no matter how much we disagree on a lot of stuff – will cease our petty squabbling at the mention of her name, draw in air through our teeth and nod in thoughtful agreement. The Unified Theory of Hotness. The combined heavyweight belts of hot. One glance from her dilated inky pupils could send anyone’s adolescence into meltdown.
On Friday night, however, she was up against it.
Alan Moore interview 2005
‘I’M BACK,” Alan Moore announces, throwing his wiry mane of hair out of his face and then carefully stroking it into place with ring-encrusted fingers.
“I haven’t gone… I’m back,” he reiterates with a gleeful smile that lights up the room.
He is explaining that his recent retirement from churning out hit comic scripts, does not mean that the Alan Moore who has won countless awards and a legion of fans for his writing is going to vanish from view.
Alan Moore interview 2003
ALAN MOORE is not talking about his book The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
This might seem strange of the Northampton author because the Hollywood film version, starring no lesser mortal than Sean Connery, is on general release this week.
On Film 2003 Jonathan Ross salivated over it as one of the year’s biggest action spectaculars.
Wouldn’t any author be forgiven for stepping into the limelight for a moment, even if only to hold up a copy of the graphic novel that inspired the project and perhaps encourage a few sales?
Not Alan Moore.