Category Archives: Uncategorized

I believe that people who have pledged to my book have probably received an email from Unbound that contains a code voucher allowing them a free £10 to another book.

There’s lots of good stuff on Unbound, and that’s basically a FREE book, as well as making another author’s day.

So please visit and use your voucher, which is valid till the end of July.

May I suggest please

All the Perverse Angels by Sarah Marr   https://unbound.co.uk/books/all-the-perverse-angels

Which sounds deliciously gothic and has got lovely rich language that made me feel like I was taking a warm bath whilst opening thick perfumed envelopes with a letter opener. And her video is really gorgeous.

Or

Slow Motion by Jennifer Pierce https://unbound.co.uk/books/slow-motion  a story of friendships and secrets that intrigued me

Or  A Murder to Die For by Stevyn Colgan  https://unbound.co.uk/books/a-murder-to-die-for who is like a machine at this crowd-funded book thing, and whose books and talks about intelligent policing are inspiring and make you think about the world in different and better ways.

If you have pledged to me,  It is FREE to help one of these authors out, just look in your emails for ones sent by Unbound and the voucher code will be in there.  And if you haven’t, then a pledge to me gets you one of these books too if you use the voucher once it arrives. Billy bargain.

https://unbound.co.uk/books/in-secure

If you are unaware of the Indycamp story, it involves some litigants in Scotland who are asserting that Jesus is the rightful King of Scotland and thus they can’t legally be evicted from the grounds of the Scottish Parliament (which obviously has no jurisdiction)

There’s a great Lowering the Bar piece here

IndyCampers Not Allowed to Call Queen Elizabeth to Testify

about the Court’s refusal to allow the Indy Camp litigants to call Queen Elizabeth to be cross-examined. There’s also the lovely detail that they contacted 144 lawyers asking them to take the case and all of them ‘said they were busy’

Anyway, the headline of this piece is something that Lord Turnbull, hearing this case today actually said to the litigants in person during today’s hearing. There’s also a lovely exchange where Lord Turnbull says  “This witness statement is signed with the single word ‘Christ’ – can we talk about that for a moment?’

I strongly urge you to follow @BBCPhilipSim on Twitter, who is live tweeting from this hearing, no doubt with his fist stuffed in his mouth to stop himself crying with laughter.  It is a CRACKER. Right now. An antidote to all of the other bad news over the last few days.

I’ve been meaning to write a review of some of the books that have most impressed or moved me in the last few months, and at a time when the news is filled with a lot of dark and troubling stuff, it seemed like a good time to write something positive.

So here are the four

1. My name is Leon by Kit de Waal
2. This is London by Ben Judah
3. The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
4. The Trouble with Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon

All four of these authors have also been super-nice when I’ve contacted them by Twitter to say how much I liked their work, which is one of the things that I most love about Twitter, and on days when it is exploding with loathing and angst and over-reactions, I remind myself that you can tell an artist that you liked their work and why, and very often they can say something back in a matter of minutes or hours.  That is really astonishing. If YOU have read something that you like, and the author is on Twitter, please tell them. It’s a nice thing to do.

1. My name is Leon  by Kit de Waal

Right. I am a TOUGH, TOUGH audience for this book. Firstly, it is set in a world that I know a lot about and spend my days in – that is the world of children who are not living with their parents and who are in care. That means if it isn’t accurate, if it makes short-cuts for dramatic licence, if it isn’t properly researched, I’ll smell it. It is like when I lived in a house with four nurses and had to stop watching Casualty because they’d just be shouting all the time “You wouldn’t put a line in like that” or  “I think you’ll find that’s FORTY FIVE CC of meta-Phenylcosine Glucosate”.  Secondly, I don’t really like sad books, and because this was telling the story of a child in care and him being split up from his little brother, there are bits that are really sad.

So, I’m a tough audience. And I absolutely loved this book. It absolutely GOT the world that I spend my days in. It got the detail right, the sequences of events right, the way that people act right, the dialogue right. It then took this world that I know so well and made me look at it in a completely different way, by placing the reader in the child’s point of view. The child isn’t the narrator, but all of the action, all of the dialogue, all of the emotions are told as though the reader is looking just over Leon’s shoulder.  He’s a fascinating character – he’s very angry and very troubled, and he has every right to be, but he’s also warm and funny and passionate and loyal to his brother.  Many of the adults in his life let him down, and sometimes they do it without even realising and sometimes they are trying very hard not to and sometimes they are oblivious, and once in a while one of them connects with him in a way that takes your breath away and it just crackles on the page. The scene where social workers come to Leon’s foster home and try to explain something utterly unexplainable to him, that though he loves his brother, because his brother is a baby and has white skin, there will be a forever family for him, but not for Leon, is told SO well,  and in a way where the pain and confusion just pours out of the sentences.  It is told, from a child’s perspective, in a way that is totally vivid, totally plausible and immensely powerful.

The book is also a beautiful object – there are sketch illustrations at the start of each chapter – of something important to Leon or something that will play a part in the chapter, and a little illustration of a bike by each page number.

Could not recommend this more highly.  It is NOT like a busman’s holiday, even if you do this work, and it isn’t the Angela’s Ashes type of misery memoir. There’s a lot of spirit and things to be uplifted about in this book, but the author hasn’t shied away from the rawness of pain when it is called for.

2. This is London – Ben Judah

This book isn’t fiction. It is journalism – of the type that George Orwell used to do. Ben Judah wanted to write about London, and the immigrants living in London, and not in a hand-wringing way or a demonising way. He just wanted to go out and spend time with people – from all sorts of nationalities, whether they are working in shops, dealing drugs, being Russian millionaires, Philippino housekeepers, down and outs. And that’s what he did. I don’t mean that he spent a few hours interviewing them – he tried to live, for a while, the lives they were living. He sleeps rough with Romanian gypsies, lives in bed and breakfasts with Polish electricians and builders, soaks himself into the lives that they are living. Then he tells their stories. It is a fascinating book – many parts of it are deeply shocking – some, like the Philippino housekeepers where he writes about the underground organisation that rescues the ones who are being abused by their employers has a fairytale ending that would make a wonderful Neil Gaiman story.  You will absolutely NEVER look at one of those handwash dispensers the same way again after you read this.

3. The Essex Serpent – Sarah Perry

Back to fiction. This is set in Victoria times (which is normally a major turn off for me in a novel) and involves a woman named Cora who has just been widowed from an abusive relationship and sets out to live the life of her choosing.  As part of this, she descends on a small town in Essex where the villagers are being plagued by what was thought to be a mythical creature known as the Essex Serpent. Cora wants to find it, others want to destroy it, still others want to deny its existence. Sadly, she leaves a wake of broken hearts in her path and is a force of nature in the book who at various times I loved and adored and other times I wanted someone to shake her.  I always like books where there’s a close knit group of characters and where the reader’s loyalties shift between them at various points and this really delivers that. It is a love story, where sometimes you are desperate for the potential lovers to stay the hell away from each other, sometimes you are yearning for them to conjoin. The story is told with immense richness of language and huge passion and it is impossible to read this without wanting to pull on a pair of boots and go out into the country and get spectacularly muddy. Sarah Perry makes the experience of trying to pull a sheep out of some mud sound as exciting and enriching as flying on a magic carpet over Istanbul. It’s an extraordinary piece of work. Read a chapter of it in a bookshop and I’ll be amazed if you don’t end up at the till with it in your hand, wondering if you can read it as you walk down the street without doing yourself a mischief.

4. The Trouble with Goats and Sheep – Joanna Cannon

I REALLY like Joanna Cannon. She was a blogger just like me, and honed her writing muscles doing that before writing this piece of fiction. It is set in a small street in sububia in the 1970s and is narrated by a young girl, Grace who is fierce and determined and ever so slightly selfish. One of the neighbour’s wives disappears, and Grace makes it her mission to find her, thinking that she is investigating a crime. Everyone else thinks that this woman has just left her husband. At least that’s what they start off by thinking.  In her investigations, she visits all of the other neighbours and piece by piece we are building up to understanding the real mystery of this street, which isn’t what Grace is investigating at all.  The book is really rich in language and detail, and Grace is really well observed as a character. Just as with Leon in the first book, seeing the story unfold from the perspective of the child means that there are things that Grace sees and hears that go over her head but mean something very different to the adult reader. There are some genuine rug-pull shocks towards the end but not shocks for the sake of it, the author has been carefully laying these foundations all the way through, and on a second read the story absolutely stands up and even improves (which isn’t usually the case with twists)

There are some really funny lines and scenes in it too. The sequence where an Indian family move in, and in desperate attempt to make small talk and ingratiate themselves and not appear racist or ignorant, one of the men tries to make a cultural connection by telling the new man that he “loves Demis Roussos”.

By page 6, the author has deployed this beautiful line “My mother had spent most of 1974 having a little lie-down” and you just know that you are in the hands of someone who can make words dance on the page. It’s a lovely book, and it has a powerful message about modern times, which I can’t raise because [SPOILERS].

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or bring on James Milner, to shore things up!
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man,
As rubbing your face furiously on the bench;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then bring on James Milner to shore things up:
Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood,
Leave Jamie Vardy frustrated in a tabard:
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let it pry through the portage of the head,
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as watching Raheem Sterling
Scuttle crablike into blind alley,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful opportunity.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide;
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English,
I think I might bring on James Milner to shore things up!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders, 
Have in these parts from morn till even fought,
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument.
Dishonour not your mothers: now attest,
That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to bloody cross a ball.

And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture: let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start.
Yet sit you down, Vardy, I seek dour industry instead
The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit; and upon this charge,
Cry ‘God why is Harry taking the corners? England! and Saint George!'

It’s been a pretty bad year for losing excellent people.

I had a pair of boxing gloves when I was a kid, and I often used to put on my dad’s dressing gown and those boxing gloves, and pretend to be Muhammed Ali. I had a book called Boxing for Boys, or something, which gave a good footwork exercise of placing glass bottles around the floor and whilst shadow boxing you’d be evading those and that would sharpen up your footwork.  It certainly sharpened up my skills with a dustpan and brush.

When I was a kid, I never understood the things about Ali that make me admire him so much now, I just knew that he was The Greatest.

And you KNOW that he would have kicked Superman’s ass.

The Boy in Blue, Goes Down in Two

Of course, Superman claims that he was letting Ali win because the safety of the world depended on it. That’s a Roberto Martinez excuse, as far as I’m concerned. Ali won.

Yeah, right, Superman MEANT to lose the whole time. Sure he did.

I think my favourite Ali story I read in Norman Mailer’s “The Fight”, the account of the Rumble in the Jungle. And if you’ve never read it, you are in for a treat.

It relates to a meal where Ali was present, and doing his “I’m so tough, I’m the toughest man that ever lived, I’m so mean I make medicine sick” schtick. And ITV Boxing correspondent, Reg Gutteridge got tired of this eventually and told Ali that he wasn’t so tough. “You think you’re a tough guy? I’ll show you what tough is.”

Reg then picked up a steak knife from the table and thrust it hilt deep into his own left leg, not even flinching.

“Now,” said Reg, “Let’s see you do that”.

That shut Ali up, not knowing that Reg had a wooden leg.

I don’t know if it is a true story or an apocryphal one, but I love it anyway.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/jan/27/obituary-boxing-reg-gutteridge-television

Her Majesty’s Court Service have published their top ten reasons for returning divorce petitions

http://www.familylaw.co.uk/news_and_comment/top-10-reasons-for-returning-divorce-petitions#.V08ctuQ1Oud

I feel that HMCTS could have spiced these up a bit, so here are my 15 reasons why divorce petitions might be rejected.

1. Jurisdiction section answered in a haiku.  Whilst the petitioner carefully used the exact number of syllables, in the 5-7-5 format, a true haiku has to be about nature, and thus fails the test.
2. Instead of cheque or fee exemption form, petitioner had enclosed a note saying “I’m waiting for Wonga to get back to me”
3. Instead of cheque or fee exemption form, petitioner had offered to “pay it out of my winnings”
4. On the section that provides the details of the Respondent, it is unacceptable to write the words “Here be Dragons”
5. Petitioner claims to be married to Tony Blair. Petitioner is not Cherie Blair.
6. In the grounds section, Petitioner has written simply the word “BI-ATCH”
7. In motor oil
8. In the grounds section, Petitioner has submitted photograph of Respondent giving her a practical Christmas present (including, but not limited to – a pressure cooker, vileda supermop, colander, new ironing board, new ironing board cover, perfumed drawer liners)
9. Petitioner in the grounds section has pleaded adultery, but has named the Co-Respondent as Lilo Lil.  Adding “THAT TART” did not remedy this deficiency.
10. Divorce petition submitted on what was originally believed to be vellum, but which has on the back page a tattoo that says “Margaret”
11. Petition too tear-stained to read  (variant 9a – petition too Chardonnay/Stella Artois stained to read)
12. Marriage certificate, whilst the original, has a jewel-encrusted dagger piercing it.
13. Petition sent to one of the many divorce Courts that we have now closed down. Send it again, properly. Oh, we lost your cheque though. And your marriage certificate.
14. Petition when read aloud, opened portal to another dimension where skunks breathe green fire
15. Petition was simply Tammy Wynnette sent to the counter to sing the application.

Given that David Cameron has announced that he is proudly pro-adoption and wants to double the number of children adopted, but there are pesky things like Y v UK setting a test that he can’t really get around, unless we leave the EU and ECHR, which I don’t believe is his policy, the DFE have instead used their approach from Residence and Contact and rebranded Placement Orders.

In the new legislation, Placement Orders will be renamed

A) For girls to “Potential Princess Order”

B) For boys to “Having trials with Chelsea / Insert team of preference here”  (Cameron did want to go with Trials with Aston Villa, but focus groups showed parents disliked that idea even more than adoption)

C) For the difficult to place children of non Caucasion backgrounds  “Chance for Brad Pitt to be your dad Order”

The microscopically small print will explain that the Government do not guarantee that these things will happen, but given that adopters MIGHT be football coaches/talent scouts, or royalty, or film stars, there is that potential.