Author: Robert Wringham

Nowness: February 2026

It’s February 2026. I’m a writer goddamit! I also dabble with publishing and film production.

I’m on a train as I write this note to you, blasting home to Glasgow. I’m having one of those “what I am doing with this gift that is life?” conversations with myself, so what better time to update the Now page?

Projects

Yesterday saw the first full, non-WIP screening of our documentary film. It went extremely well and you find me a little bit buzzy.

My second novel, Tether has gushed out. It is disgusting bliss. And is yellow. Get it, players!

I’ve written a few pieces for New Escapologist Issue 19 and commissioned others still. Issue 18 remains good and fresh though, so please pick up a copy online or at one of these excellent places.

I’m yet not sure what my next big project should be. I’m thinking of doing some New Escapologist collections of early issues. These should be better than “best ofs” and I see the archive editions of Worn journal as something to aspire to.

That said, I don’t want to spend a year managing the long tail of legacy projects. I’d like to crack on with the third novel. I also have an idea for a thing dependent on snagging interviews with two quite high-profile guys, so there are practical challenges there.

Other stuff too. As you can probably tell, I’m reconstituting.

Reading

I’ve been reading Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, by the mid-century Argentine novellist Julio Cortázar. Its a 1982 account of Cortázar and his wife Carol Dunlop travelling between Marseille and Paris (usually a journey of a couple of hours) in a VW van, stopping for the night at every other rest station over the course of a month. It’s absolutely brilliant and their experiment was done years before psychogeography or love of motorway modernism really existed.

I’m having fun trying to smash my wishlist. I want to read or acquire the whole lot of it this year. A nourishing time.

I also have an ongoing project to read all of Stephen King. Good clean fun.

Travel

We’re on a train as we speak. Pay attention. We just passed through Wigan North Western station.

Culture Gobbling

I lik this picture (from this Guardian item) of puppeteer Ted Milton playing with his son in 1971:

Scarred For Life is a great podcast with good guests. They each bring three “scars” from their childhoods, usually (but not always) from things glimpsed via popular culture. Yvette Fielding’s episode is a fascinating insight into the production of paranormal telly while Dom Joly’s recent one is a remarkable account of his travel writing career. Nick Helm’s “scar” of Freddy Kreuger popping up everywhere in 1980s London, especially on posters in the Tube, is very relatable to me: it sounds like we both had childhoods spent flinching at strange and inappropriately-placed horror film images.

I’m watching Starfleet Academy because curiosity got the best of me. I generally dislike NuTrek, so that this show is watchable is miraculous. Akiva Goldman, notably, was nowhere near the creative process.

I’m filling my Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze gaps. Here’s a rare and pleasant documentary about Maurice Sendak made by Jonze that I carelessly and probably illegally lobbed onto YouTube:

When I mentioned the Sendak film to friend Lando, he sent me this collection of interviews between Sendak and NPR’s Terry Gross. Tis moving.

Sometimes, stand-up comedy is important to me: positive, rugged, pure, independent, ideas-driven, a cleanse. Other times, I’m disgusted and bored by it. It makes me feel glad at the moment, though the mudslide of mediocre acts about to take over my favourite Glasgow music venue for the March comedy festival threatens to push my buttons. One of my first stand-up loves was Harry Hill’s Man Alive video, which was very much a sacred text. Harry is back now, on YouTube for free, with The Harry Hill Show. It’s absolutely adorable. I am instantly a fan of “Name the Seed,” and I love that it’s filmed at Battersea Arts Centre where I have many several happy memories, not least interviewing the Iceman for a day. Go away from the flats.

Physical Form

Here’s how I look now, shot on expired Polaroid film by the Iceman himself:

And a wider shot of what was actually going down:

Old Now pages (Then pages?) are squirreled pointlessly into the Now Page Archive

Published
Categorised as Nowness

Nowness: October 2025

It’s mid-October 2025. I live in Glasgow. I’m a writer, but I’ve been dabbling in film production and book publishing.

Projects

The edit continues on our documentary film. It’s almost done. We have a screening scheduled at the Wolverhampton Lockworks on 8th February 2026, but we’re also hoping for a premiere before then.

I’m still tinkering with my second novel, which is almost finished. It will be published soon in a mysterious way with no blurb, synopsis or cover design.

As an upstart publisher, I recently midwifed Diary at the Centre of the Earth Vol. 1 by Dickon Edwards. There’s a launch event in London on 24th October 2025 and we’ll be selling and signing copies at the Small Publishers Fair on 24th and 25th October.

Issue 18 of New Escapologist has just arrived from the printers. It will be for sale at the bookfair mentioned above and subscriber copies will be shipping soon.

Reading

You can see what I’m reading at this very moment here, plus I recently initiated a lunatic project to read every book by Stephen King.

Travel

My most recent trip was to Montreal in September. On this trip I saw a bit of contemporary art, a lot of family, bought and read Big Mall by Canadian Kate Black, ate poutine and the world’s best bagels and challah and hamantaschen, and drank a lot of Third Wave coffee and St. Ambroise oatmeal stout.

I’m now planning a November trip to Utrecht for my third visit to Le Guess Who? festival. On my way, I’ll also see Krakow in Poland for the first time, travelling 13 hours by rail to my final destination.

Culture Goblin

I’ve become very interested in a 1970s comedian called John Paul Joans. Please tell me if you know anything about him.

Ever the connoisseur of melting ice, I enjoyed hearing a glacier melt at the Montreal CCA.

I recently saw Six Organs of Admittance and Richard Youngs at Glasgow’s Old Hairdressers. I bought School of the Flower on vinyl at the merch table and have been listening to it ever since.

I’m watching some recent spooky stuff in October. Best so far has been Little Monsters (2019). Looking forward to Good Boy (2025).

I’ve been drinking Kenyan coffee at Kahawa Mzuri in Glasgow.

I deleted all of my witterings at Bluesky, a social network I broke my vow to muck about with. It’s fine over there but I’d rather use my energy to rewild the Old Web, as you should too.

I’ve been browsing the Now pages indexed by Derek Sivers. I seek out the non-tech people.

I sincerely love my wife’s Monster of the Week blog.

Physical Form

Here’s a picture of me in the bathroom of a new local coffee spot called Amulet.

Old Now pages (Then pages?) are squirreled pointlessly into the Now Page Archive

Published
Categorised as Nowness

Practice

People are getting better at the “practice” versus “practise” rule. Have you noticed?

Bloggers get it right more often than not now. Submissions I receive for New Escapologist, even when they’re terrible, get “practice” and “practise” spot-on.

It’s like when supermarkets a few years ago started describing their express checkout lanes as being for “five items or fewer” instead of the incorrect but time-honoured “five items or less.”

You see, “practice” is a noun and “practise” is a verb. It’s “an artistic practice” but “practise makes perfect.”

I’m a bit of a grammar pedant with strong feelings about ugly words, but I’m sorry to say I’ve been left behind on this “practise” business. For me, it’s all “practice” and always has been, but apparently that’s the American way.

For once, I distance myself from the pedants. It can all, I think, be “practice.”

I still prefer “foetus” to “fetus” though.

Brilliant and Funny

This just in:

I finished Rub-A-Dub-Dub today. It has been a most treasured summer read for me. Brilliant and funny (I think I averaged one chortle per page). Hit me in the way the best Kurt Vonnegut books do: a humane portrait of the absurd, futile and grotesquely beautiful enterprise of being human.

So fuck this guy.

One chortle per page is good whack, by the way. The book is 281 pages, making it better for your abs than any kind of workout.

And this is the sort of thing I like to see:

Smells Nice

Not too many of these left on Planet Earth.

I gave these out at gigs in 2008. Made by Eric and Tommy.

Yentob

Alan Yentob died. I used to think I was the only person who liked him. And I did like him. I thought he was cool.

But Amol Rajan’s tribute to him is something else:

Engaging, witty and endlessly curious, he brought energy and warmth to every conversation. He was generous with his time, fierce in his convictions, and full of joy in the work of others.

To work with Alan was to be inspired and encouraged to think bigger. He had a rare gift for identifying talent and lifting others up – a mentor and champion to so many across the worlds of television, film and theatre.

Modern art never had a more loyal ally. His shows were always brilliant, often masterpieces, sometimes seminal. So much of Britain’s best TV over five decades came via his desk. That was public Alan. In private, he was magnetic, zealous and very funny, with a mesmerising voice and mischievous chuckle. He oozed fortitude until the very last.

He had his foibles and failures, but Alan Yentob was one of the most generous, influential, singular, passionate, supportive, creative and loved men of his generation. I commend his spirit to the living.

Now, that’s a loved man. Imagine a colleague saying that about you!

Some favourite Yentob things:

1. He is one of the “men” in Nigel William’s Two and a Half Men in a Boat.

2. BBC’s Arena arts documentaries – here’s my playlist of about 50 episodes scrounged up for rainy day viewing whenever they appear on YouTube. I wish the BBC would put all of them online in an archive – there were hundreds of these made, as well as Monitor, Ombnibus, and Imagine strands.

3. Dickon Edwards’ 2006 account of being on Imagine: “Mr. Yentob is nowhere to be seen.”

4. A 2016 Guardian profile of Yentob, “the last impresario.”

5. Cracked Actor

Fridged

You’ve seen a version of this pic before, but m’colleague Mark just sent me a signed version in the post.

Signed, that is, by S. Lee and R. Herring (who, despite that various other achievements in work and life will always be Pliny and Histor to me) at their separate gigs last week.

Normally I put this sort of thing in my Kubrik Box, but this one made the fridge. I want to see it every time I get milk. “There’ll always be milk!“

Zit

In an empty elevator this morning, I used the mirror to squeeze a zit.

It was a luxurious experience. The mirror was huge, wall-to-wall. The lighting was bright and even. What better opportunity for an act of minor surgery?

Just as I was getting to grips with it, a tiny voice said “hold the lift,” but it sounded distant and surely not for me (this was a bank of six elevators).

A woman slithered in sideways through the closing doors. “Oh sorry,” I said, “Did you just ask me to hold the lift?”

“Yes, but that’s alright.”

“I was just using the mirror to squeeze a zit,” I said.

“Ah.”

“So I wasn’t being an arsehole,” I said, “Just disgusting.”

Glad we got that cleared up.

Get an Umbrella

A neighbour is setting up some deckchairs and a picnic table on the back court.

This is what I call “the Glasgow rain dance.”

See also: “summoning a postman” (drawing a bath).

Demure

The view from our back window is fairly depressing. We live three floors above a busy commercial street, so our “back court” (the area where wheelie bins thrive) is actually the flat roof of a restaurant, all stainless steel extractor fans and outlet vents.

We can see various neighbours’ back courts at their vista of junk, including mountains of seldom-touched outdoor children’s toys, dropped bicycles with training wheels still attached, and hopeless lockdown purchases: mini trampolines, hooded barbeques, not used since we moved downmarket almost four years ago. There’s a fridge-freezer out there, and a never-again-to-be-collected wheelie bin with planks of wood burping out of it.

What frequently cheers me up though, when looking out of said window, is the sight of my downstairs neighbour walking his cat.

The cat is quite a fancy longhaired breed, but he seems to cooperate quite demurely with his master’s antics.

He’s not even on the lead today.