So yes, hooray, tomorrow, Wednesday 30th September, I’ll be reading from my first book, We Can’t All Be Astronauts, at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. But wait! Not only will my esteemed Aisle16 brothers in arms Luke Wright, Joe Dunthorne and John Osborne be providing support with new work, but we have a very … Read more

Of all the video game titles we’ve encountered so far, The First Funky Fighter is the most semantically problematic, colliding various contradictory images into a single, on the face of it ludicrous, claim of primacy. One definition of the word ‘funk’ is ‘the smell of sexual intercourse’, thus making the protagonist ‘The First Fighter Who … Read more

When I heard Jezza Beadle had snuffed it I were rate sad. Not in that whole, ‘Hay let’s get stoned then watch Volume 3 of Steven Segal’s Body & Spirit Motivational Workout on VHS’ internet-age hyper-irony way – I genuinely remembered him as seeming like a nice guy who was made the target of a … Read more

I’ve been threatening for a while now to do a post about my favourite website, Metafilter. But the pressure of actually putting something together that would adequately sum up why I love it, while encouraging others to go and check it out – the amount of time it’d take me to put that kind of … Read more

So We Can’t All Be Astronauts has been shortlisted for East Anglian Book of the Year 2009. You can see who else is on the shortlist here. That’s exciting, isn’t it? I feel very chuffed that the judges liked it. Hopefully a few more readers will stumble across it as a result. I’ll be spinning … Read more

I haven’t been on holiday, on an actual, bona fide, you’re-here-to-relax-not-to-do-work vacation, since I was in sixth form. This is partly because I’m very lucky to do a job that I enjoy, nay love, that sees me heading off to all sorts of interesting places, and a whole slew of festivals, and getting paid to … Read more