September 8. Wet all day. Toothache.

September 9. Toothache

September 10. Toothache

September 11. Toothache

October 16. Dissected an eel.

Here’s a pic of me and John Dowie with Tony less than a year ago. I feel lucky to have met him.

And here’s one of the first pics you see adorning the wall when you enter the Comedy Store today.

Coo Coo, Daddy Long Legs.

Projects

I’m working on Issue 20 of New Escapologist, my magazine for likeminded wastrels with unearned aristocratic sensibilities.

I’m tinkering with a secret American side project. Shhhh.

And Stewart Lee is saying extraordinary things about our film.

Travel

We’re planning to spend the end of the year at our volcano lair (in-laws’ spare room) in Montreal. 🌋

Friend J just asked me to join him for some days meandering at Berlin Jazz Fest. Shall I go? The money would be better spent going somewhere I haven’t been before, I think, but it would be so much fun. Thinking about it

Reading

I’m reading some high-brow stuff at the moment: Chris Claremont’s yonks-long X-Men tenure and Stephen King’s Christine as part of my madcap project to read every Kingler.

You can see what I’m reading at any given minute here.

Culture

My X-Men readin’ is accompanied by the very funny Ex-Men podscarf. 🎸 “TRANS GIRLS! / EX-MEN! / REBORN AND CHEATING DEATH! / TRANS GIRLS! / MUTANTS! / CIS-GENDER’S FINAL DEATH! / NOW / WE’RE / EX-MEN!” 🤘

Spooky Season is here, which means its time for Samara and me to munch our way through the candy corn that is our 2026 horror hit list. There’s some obvious stuff in there like Backrooms (2026), but there’s plenty of weirdness including a 1966 Shatner flick presented entirely in Esperanto.

Speaking of film, I just saw Bad Apples at the GFT, which was great, but whenever I type “apples” I inadvertently type “applies.” This guy recommends Bad Applies. 🍎🍏🍏

Off to see Jon Ronson on Saturday.

Physical Form

This is me (right) with Mark Carwright and Michael Cumming on 19th September for our Melt It! screening at Brewery Arts Kendal.

And this is also me (right) with Samara at the Sparkle Horse pub in Glasgow this week. Pic by Alan.

the curtains opened to reveal a dozen rocket launchers aimed at the audience.

Projects

I’m preparing for one more 2026 Melt It! screening, this time in the Lakes with special guest Michael “Brass Eye” Cumming.

Aside from that, I find myself at a fork in the roads as we approach the last third of the year. I’d like to start a new novel, which would involve clearing the decks of smaller tasks and projects for the necessary peace of mind. As such, I’m tempted to ditch the New Escapologist December release, which would also give the current one more time to pay for itself. Hmm.

In the other direction, I’ve been involved in some smashing events lately and I’m in the mood for more. This (for me) isn’t compatible with novel-writing. Still, were I to book those events, I’d have the bandwidth to do the New Esc after all and I could probably also faff with the second draft of a regretfully backburnered secret American writing project (ooh, mysterious). It’s just that (a) I’ve already delivered a tonne of stuff this year (Tether, NE19, EE!10, tour) and (b) I’m obviously procrastinating on starting the novel.

You know what? In typing this out, I think I’ve settled on it. One sometimes needs to think with one’s fingertips. Please expect more live events before the year ends, plus NE20. If it’s fun, why not? Maybe I’m not ready to retreat into a novel-writing hole just yet. Thanks for helping me to chew this over.

Travel

I’ve enjoyed seeing more of my native isles while on tour. Hark at the long lad.

The largely renationalised trains have been working well for me, and I’ve hardly been half a day late to anything at all.

We decided today that we will end the year in Montreal, at our volcano lair (in-laws’ spare room). 🌋

Reading

I just polished off The Umbrella Man and Other Stories: What We Talk About When We Talk About the JFK Assassination (2026) by Martin Fitzgerald, which sounds a bit Dad but is totally Rad. The first 40% is excellent. It’s about the lives and backstories of various witnesses to the assassination. It’s a remarkable bit of storytelling and is really exciting. The idea is to provide human context to what we see in the Zapruder footage: it works well. The remaining 60% takes the form of more standard assassination travel writing about the author’s trip to Dallas. I enjoyed this part too, but it’s the first half that properly glistens.

You can see what I’m reading at any given minute here.

Culture

What shall I see at Sonica then?

Humans

At the recent Edinburgh screening, I reconnected with someone who was very important to me twenty years ago. This feels good. I’m also trying to be a better son to my aging and wrinkled parents by visiting more often and texting with my poorly dad.

Monking

To celebrate having made the decision on which projects to handle next, I will spend this afternoon sweeping the accumulated dust and dead clothes moth bodies from the edges of our rooms. I am just like the mad monk who sayeth: “We remove dust to sweep away our worldly desires. We scrub dirt to free ourselves of attachments.”

Physical form

This is not my best angle, but here’s a snap from culture historian Travis Elborough at Dickon’s show last week:

Her soap appears to have been carved raw out of the side of a cliff; shampoo and conditioner in two enormous apothecary bottles I cannot imagine transporting for refills. Perhaps they are left outside the front door and refilled by an attendant with a horse-drawn vat. I pick up a wooden toothbrush and scan around for toothpaste until I notice a little black glass caviar jar marked Oral Care. The unguent inside is jet-black and is applied to the brush with a small wooden teardrop attached to the side of the jar by on length of twine.

It tastes like the sea at night.

My preference is for personal grooming products that look and smell like power toilet cleaners, but I am willing to concede, as I pick a literal piece of heather out of my eye after washing my face, that I have been following the wrong metaphors.

Don’t let Black Bag‘s Booker nomination put you off. Just give your hands a good wash after reading it and you’ll be fine.

There’s no smoke in the room now, so you don’t go home stinking.

Here’s a lengthy recorded chat with the charming and knowledgeable David Eastaugh of the C86 Show.

We mostly talk about the Iceman and Melt It! but also about the changes we’ve witnessed on the comedy scene, a little bit about music, and a smidge about growing up in the ’90s.

🧊

Melt It! will screen at Edinburgh’s Cameo Picturehouse this Saturday 8th, 14:30. The audience will be played in by saw player Avril Smart and we’ll be interviewed after the film by special guest host Bilal Zafar.

There are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct. — Montaigne

Now you’re talking.

Projects

I’m getting my shit together for a screening Melt It! The Film of the Iceman at the beautiful Cameo Picturehouse in Edinburgh. It’s on Saturday 8th August at 2:30pm if you’d like to come along. This will be cool. Like ice.

I just wrote an account of the Melt It! tour for my blog. Blogging is the best.

New Escapologist Issue 19 is shipping now, as is a tenth-anniversary edition of Escape Everything! Both are also available in stylish bookshops.

Reading

Since returning from the tour, I went insane and read three books in as many days. There were the so-so brand new Red Dwarf: Titan (RIP Rob), Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) as part of a mad project to read aaaaall the Kinglers, and Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Fishing (2025) which is good for summoning old men who want to talk to you if you read it in the pub. Why not see how many you can trap?

I’m currently the brilliant Mrs. Bridge (1959) about which Dorothy Parker said “I only wish I knew how it was done,” and will soon move on to The Journal of a Disappointed Man (1919) by W. N. P. Barbellion. You just try and stop me.

You can see what I’m reading at any given minute here.

Culture

My current telly is Ultra City Smiths.

The Edinburgh Festivals are about to start poppin’. The Alternative Comedy Memorial Society has a good guide to the outré acts if you’re not sure what to see.

Physical form

This is me (on the left) with Steve Sullivan at Chapter Arts in Cardiff last week. He directed Being Frank: The Chris Sivey Story and he came to see Melt It! “Fantastic!”

Cartwright and Wringham have given us a fine portrait here, quirky and absurd, human and moving. While it focuses on the Iceman the film also captures a particular era of comedy performance perfectly, and allows for its participants to reminisce fondly, and very articulately, on the hidden depths of the absurd.

An extremely kind review of Melt It! from OutsideLeft.

The comic novels I love are books that could just as easily have been tragedies. It is simply that the author has decided it’s funny.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s advice about writing. I’m not interested. I read a lot and I have my own voice. Fuck you.

But I’ll make an exception for Pulitzer-winning author Andrew Sean Greer.

Actually, no. Fuck him too. But! There are some gems in this piece of his in the Guardian today.

the job (as a novelist now and not a diarist) [is] to get to the hardships and frustrations of my characters. Because, to me, comedy is only great fun if it is about something hard and true.

and

First, I work out the hardships and frustrations of the characters as realistically, even tragically, as possible. People die in comic novels. Sometimes the world ends, or sometimes just the world we thought we knew, and I have to consider the real reactions of my characters because, after all, they don’t know it’s a comedy. Second, I begin to write it as if it’s all just a funny story. That takes a great deal of struggle and sometimes feels impossible.

I relate to that last part. I don’t do much to promote my comic writing because I’m a little bit embarrassed by it. It’s closer to my soul than, say, Melt It! or New Escapologist. Promoting my comic novels feels like sending a dick pic. I imagine. But the above makes me think I’m at one with a Pulitzer novellist. I’m not being arrogant: I have travelled that very path, made those same decisions.

So, I dunno, maybe I should stand by my comic novels a bit more. Maybe they’re good. You decide. They’re called Rub-A-Dub-Dub and Tether.

life is a vale of tears, and there’s no fixing it, but just for fun let’s fix this one small piece. Let’s decide, briefly, to lift the weight of being. You can’t successfully do that, I think, without being honest about it first.

So sorry to hear of the death of Bill Oddie, a towering polymath who could have been a great jazz musician, but settled for being a brilliant comedian.

The brutality of some of the Goodies‘ skewering and surreal social satire makes some episodes of their innovative and inspirational TV shows all but unbroadcastable today, and there, always chugging away in the underlay, are Bill’s brilliant jazzy funky scores.

A superb musical parodist – his pastiche of Joe Cocker singing the folk song On Ilkley Moor B’ah Tat is pin sharp and hilarious and joyously absurd – he is also responsible for one of the great British funk singles, Funky Gibbon.

Often described as ‘spikey’ by the public, I suspect Bill was in fact a sensitive man who sometimes found the endless presidential air he was required to sustain by members of the public approaching him a hard act to keep up all the time. Bill, in whatever context, was never anything else but himself.

12th July – Dundee

A successful first screening, a gentle afternoon one to get things started. Mark drives the four of us — our partners, Samara and Helen, join us for the Scottish leg — from Glasgow to Dundee where we’re met by David at the DCA. He treats us to coffee and sorts out our comps and our minimal tech. We’re soon joined by Phill who shares showbiz anecdotes over a scone.

Showtime and Phill goes for a stroll around the gallery having watched our screener last night. I introduce the film alone for no particular reason and this sets the tour standard of taking the intro in turns. 45 minutes into the film, we hear Phill laughing biggly from somewhere in the room and it fills us with glee. Phill is a lovely host for the Q&A. He generously praises the film as a good record of the times but also calls us “these young… I think the technical term is idiots” for putting so much effort into a film for no money, which is correct and I will always love him for it.

13th July – Glasgow

Yeah baby. We arrive at the famous GFT at 8pm with lovely Gabe already waiting for us in the lobby. Alan soon arrives and takes pictures of us all gathered around our poster. People start arriving and, naturally, I know most of them. I shake hands and hug people and thank them for coming. About 70 people turn up, which is too many get lovey with so we get on with it. Mark and I introduce the film together, me with the mic and he standing next to me like Silent Bob. It’s really funny but for some reason we still commit to taking it in turns from now on. As I witter on, I can see so many friendly faces in the audience: Johnston, Catherine, Louise, Alex, Dani. I remember my first stint at stand-up in 2004 where I snuck out of our flat on an excuse because I couldn’t risk my flatmate wanting to come along; today I love having friends in. It feels great. The audience laugh well, the biggest woofers probably going to Stew. It sounds great having so many people laughing along and I catch Mark’s eye the first time it happens. “Mission accomplished” is the message that passes between us. The Q&A goes well with lots of great and funny questions from Gabe and equally good ones from the audience. Because I know everyone, I feel compelled to introduce them to the rest of the room before they ask their question: “This is John. He makes sculptures from squashed irn bru cans and nitrous oxide cannisters.”

Selling books and Iceman posters in the lobby after the show, a girl brings her copy of You Are Nothing to be signed. I’ve never seen a copy quite so quite knackered. She explains that she carries it around in her pocket all the time. She shows me where Stewart Lee and Simon Munnery have already signed it and I add my scrawl. Not every show can be a lovely as this one. Can it?

14th July – A night off

Phew, about time we had a night off. This shit is merciless. Samara and I wake up in our own bed while Mark and Helen are in a hotel. When we join up again, we go to see Stewart Lee’s Man Wulf show at the King’s Theatre. I search out Gabe and his mum sitting up in the gods and when I finally spot them, they are gleefully waving. I wave back, making a spectacle of myself in this massive room. I’m also wearing an Hawaiian shirt. Stew comes on and we all marvel at his little plastic knob. Somewhere along the way, Mark buttonholes Stew and gets him to sign some special posters with his praise quote printed improbably large on it. Also somewhere along the way Mark gets shat on by a pigeon. Samara tells him it’s lucky. Mark isn’t so sure. We go home to clean the cack out of his only tour jacket.

15th July – Sheffield

Doom, doom doom. Only two tickets have sold for the Showroom Cinema, one of them being to John Robinson of OutsideLeft who we later ask to host the Q&A so it was really an audience of one. We meet John at a slightly rubbishy pub but one where we can see the venue from the window so there’s no chance of being late to our own funeral. In a desperate attempt to double our audience, we leave fliers on tables and talk to a few people about the film. Some goth girls say “wow!” when I tell them about the film and others make positive noises too, but my rogue salesmanship results in zero extra sales. “It’s the football, the heat and… just Sheffield,” says a team member apologetically. “Oh, don’t say that,” I say, “Sheffield is lovely,” but this is long before we see the inner-city carnage on the walk to the hotel. He wasn’t wrong though: only four people had come to see the Asian Film Festival screening in Screen 3 and absolutely nobody was in Screen 1 for Evil Dead Burn. So at least we knocked Evil Dead into a cocked hat.

After the screening, we take “the whole audience” to the pub. We go to the Rutland as recommended by Dan. It’s a nice pub with queer vibes, decorated with pop culture bits and bobbins. The ale is good and we drink loads of it, Mark choosing an IPA appropriately called Krush’d Dreams. Mark stays positive and keeps the mood up beautifully, though in the back of my mind I’m thinking “this was a dismal failure.” I fall asleep in the easyHotel as soon as my trousers are off. Through beery dreams, I sense Mark go out for a cigarette. He tells me later that there was a comatose man surrounded by police in the hotel entrance and another man trying to intimidate the receptionist. In the morning, we get breakfast at a Wetherspoons near the hotel. It is full of insane people making bestial asylum noises and day drinkers buying Strongbow at 10:30am. I overhear two snatches of conversation on my way to and from the toilet: “just tell the police officer when he gets here” and “I swear there’s a murder every week.” We leave the pub still chewing.

16th July – Liverpool

In the car, Mark lambasts me for not liking Sheffield, that I’m quick to judge. “Look at it,” he says, as we drive through some Sheffield suburbs, “it’s lovely.” It’s fine, I suppose. Better than “fine,” however, are some of the sights we see on our way to Liverpool. Derbyshire is breathtakingly beautiful. Pass several caverns open to tourists, we start quoting Mark Gatiss’ “Stump Hole” monologue at length. “Tongue out, black. Eyes protruding.” We shut our fool mouths when part of the drive takes through terrain that looks and feels like Jurassic Park, prehistoric rocks jutting out from moss-green mountains. It feels like something you’d normally need to hike tediously out to see, but here we are driving through it in our little JP jeep. We pass a cavern advertised prominently as “The Devil’s Arse,” which allows me to hit the Internet now to find out where on Earth we actually were. We switch off the Tanacious D album (the proper first one) we’d been singing along to at the top of our lungs for the second time to appreciate the vista like an owl might after you cut two holes for the eyes. Quoting niche comedy is our shared language and we do it all the way down the spine of Great Britain. If anyone else had been with us, we’d have driven them completely mad. At the end of a short a pit stop, Mark mangles a sentence and gives rise to the phrase “let’s make some hayway,” which would become a samephrase for the rest of the tour.

Our first stop in Liverpool was to Stand Alone Tattoo where Mark’s old schoolfriend Richard Gethin practices. The atmosphere there is lovely, one of camaraderie and a pleasant minimalist peace. Richard hands me a beer from the fridge and I watch as Mark is illuminated with an image of the Iceman’s duck. It’s the version originally illustrated for the film by animator Michael Eaton and it looks splendid-splendid-splendid.

Hot Water Comedy is inside a warehouse in an industrial estate. The place has been converted into a European-style food hall with a bar and multiple venues. It is air conditioned and kids run amok. It strikes us immediately as a fun place and soon we see our name in lights (the name of the film at least) on an old-fashioned cinema promo board above the door of the venue. After our technical set-up, the audience files in and we’ve sold more tickets than we’d thought. As they arrive, one by one, we feel happier and happier. A real boost after Sheffield. We’d arranged no host for the Q&A today so we did it together, stand-up style, taking it in turns to speak. We find a nice rhythm, batting the topics back and forth between us. Questions asked by audiences so far have been largely quite similar so we’re able to tighten and improve our answers as we travel south, making them funnier and generally better.

Signing books and posters after the show, a guy tells us he knows Anthony’s nephew, that the documentary has been talk of their town for a while and he can’t believe he got to see it. Another person says they work for a local authority and they want our help to find spesh acts for a festival. We go home as late as possible to our shitty digs (our hotel had cancelled last-minute and we’d to quickly booked a room in a flop that looked like the Spaced house on AirBnB).

17th July – Cardiff

A small audience at Chapter Arts, but we’re glad to be at the original home of Go Faster Stripe. We’re cheerfully grilled by GFS’s own Chris Evans (not that one) in the Q&A and we meet Steve Sullivan, director of Being Frank. He came to see our film and I can hardly believe it. We chat happily afterwards, supping expensive arts centre pints and exchanging Iceman and Sidebottom stories.

Chris, Mark and I hit The Fagg for karaoke and mercifully cheap Butty Bach. We talk for hours and I sing Wonderboy. Back to Chris’ house, the famous Go Faster Towers. He shows us the garage where he keeps his stock, including a big box of of You Are Nothing. The source! Chris gives us some of these to sell on the road and lets me scav a copy of Stew’s Pea Green Boat on vinyl. Mark takes a copy of The Gaffa Tapes. We sleep the sleep of the just.

18th July – Birmingham

A decent turnout at the MAC, which I think of as the alma-mater of my friend John Dowie who got some of his first performance experience there in the 1970s. This show sees a reunion with most of the Melt It! crew including Chris, Ange, Ben and Rob. A little homecoming. Some football is happening and we escape town as quickly as we can lest traffic devour us. We sleep at Mark’s (where I notice a Polaroid taken by the Iceman at the very first screening in Wolverhampton back in February), he in his own bed and I on the living room couch and anyone who says otherwise is lying.

19th July – St Leonards

We rise at 6am for a long, long drive to the south coast. After six hours and a third rendition of Tenacious D, we arrive in St. Leonards-on-Sea to find half the town dressed as pirates. We ask no questions. I could look it up now but I don’t want to know. Let’s just be content to think this is always the way in St. Leonard’s. We’re early, so we walk down to the seafront to stretch our legs, inhale some salty air, and… wait, who the hell is this coming out of the sunrise? The Iceman! We are literally in town for five minutes and here he is, the hero of the hour. He’s on his way to visit his former roadie who lives in Marine Court, the art deco building you can see me trying to lick in the photo above.

The venue — Kino Teatre — is absolutely smashing. In my intro, I explain to the decent-sized audience that we take it in turns to do these intros and that “I feel like a little boy who has won a competition” since I get to speak here on my own. The room has that lovely old theatre smell (the seats and the stage curtains salvaged from a closed theatre in Leicester Square, I’m told) and the stage is at floor level, which I love. The room is also very wide, so you can’t see the whole audience at one time, so you have to keep going back and forth, from left to right and back again, to include everyone. This is something else I like because it gives you something to do instead of merely speaking. “Stick around to the end,” I tell the audience, “for the Q&A where we’ll be joined by someone for a very special surprise… oh, you’ve already seen him? Yeah, it’s the Iceman,” as Anthony had been doing a lot of capering in the lobby. The audience were the best and most generous laughers we’d had on the tour, which was a nice way to end it. For the first time, at the request of the venue, there is an interval between the film and Q&A. I decide to sit with the merch stall in the lobby in case anyone leaving wanted to buy a book, but only four people left the auditorium and only to use the bathroom (“for a wee-wee” as I’d put it in my intro only to have it quoted back to me a lady on her way to do just that). The Q&A capably led by Ewan Marshall was another smasher, joined as we were towards the end by the Chilly One himself. My local friend Dickon turned up a bit late, missing my brilliant intro but would have many nice things to say after the show; I also photograph him with the Iceman in a moment of strange joined-up history – two niche performers, at last side by side.

Instead of staying over in St. L’s, we say a teary goodbye to Anthony, Ewan and Dickon in favour of hitting the road and making some hayway. Only a mile out of town, however, Mark makes an impressive u-ie when we see a sign pointing to the Long Man of Wilmington. We pull over and get out of the car for a look. I haven’t seen the Long Man in 35 years but he hasn’t changed. An older couple are ambling around, the eccentric-looking husband with his shirt completely unbuttoned. “Watch out for the big dog poo over here,” the woman calls to us, which seems a bit unnecessary as we are quite a long way from where she’s pointing. When we eventually see the poo, it is humongous, impossible to miss, and was obviously done by her husband. We leave the Long Man and the human tod behind, feeling faintly nauseous. Mark drives us back to Wolverhampton, our film’s spiritual home.

After a couple of days visiting my parents, I walk to Wolverhampton train station, passing the Lockworks Cinema where our February screening took place. It gave me one of those “full circle” feelings. I pop into a bookshop where I see a girl I went to sixth form with. She’s worked there for 25 years and the last time I saw her was at this very counter. Unlike with the Long Man of Wilmington, it was like she’d aged suddenly – BANG – by a quarter century. It fucked me up, man. I bought the first Red Dwarf novel published in thirty years for the train home to Glasgow. It was rubbish.

Now look here. There are three more opportunities to see Melt It! this year: at Edinburgh’s Cameo Picturehouse on August 8th, at London’s Bill Murray on August 23rd, and at Kendal’s Brewery Arts on September 19th. After that, you’ll be shit out of luck. Why not come and join the fun?

I’ll be providing the voices of Derek Jarman and Samuel Pepys for Dickon Edwards’ salon about diaries. Victoria Redfern is bringing the Woolf. Travis Elborough hosts. FREE TICKETS.

Hey Rob,

Greetings from the wilds of Canada.

We came upon a waterfall during our camping trip this week and thought it a perfect occasion to tuck into a few pages of Tether — falling water being, of course, a central theme of this fantastic book.

Hope your summer has some wet and wild experiences in store also.

Munnery must be in the rest of that crew.

People of taste will buy Dowie’s recent book and one-man play.

New Escapologist is the magazine for pleasure seekers, dreamers, shoestring iconoclasts, tinkerers, skivers, believers, and dilettantes. We’re for those who don’t like conventional employment, unthinking consumerism, meetings, marketing, and default mediocrity. Join our mass exodus and be free.

In this edition, we ask if “Do What Thou Wilt” could ever be an adequate moral system. We also take off our clothes for money, escape into Virtual Reality, reject the Return-to-Office mandate, write our wills, and explore marital politics through the writings of Sayaka Murata.

We present new columns from Tom Hodgkinson, Apala Chowdhury, Dickon Edwards and McKinley Valentine, plus interviews with Stuckist artist Ella Guru and signmaker-musician Rob Glover. Reader, the escape valve is open and it whistles a beguiling tune.

Available in print and digital formats from the online shop.

A bagel in a kangaroo.

I’ll spend the next few days gradually shipping the copies ordered through the Kickstarter campaign. I should have some extra copies though, so if you’d like one here’s where to get it.

The main idea behind bringing the book back into print is to push it into bookshops to hopefully reach some new people in a nice, old-fashioned analogue way. This means copies available on the website will be limited for now (though I’m also quietly hoping for a second print run depending on how things go in the shops).

Thanks to everyone who backed the Kickstarter and to everybody who grabs a copy now.

Projects

We’re taking Melt It! The Film of the Iceman on a ten-date summer tour. You should come. What better way to cool down? This will be ace. Also, check out our brand new trailer (above).

New Escapologist Issue 19 is ready to ship, as is a tenth-anniversary edition of Escape Everything! Both will soon be available in stylish bookshops.

Reading

I just turned the final pages of How Not to Die (Too Soon) by Devi Sridhar on whom I have a devastating crush.

I’m about to start reading The Day the World Stops Shopping by J. B. Mackinnon because I’d love to know what would happen. Chaos, I expect.

Did you know that you can see what I’m reading at any given instant here? If you’re feeling lonely, just have a look at what I’m reading to achieve a palpable sense of connection. It’s what the Internet is good for. Just don’t tap the glass.

Culture

Last night I went to see friend Rowan play Tennent’s Laughter Lounge as I have every right to do.

I’m watching an American shitshow called From. It’s exactly the same as Lost but with uglier actors and I even though I know it won’t pay off in the remaining time it has left on the obscure MGM streaming platform, I simply can’t look away.

I enjoyed The Ex at the Flying Duck last week. They were incredible and the place was full of bouncy skinheads. It was a good final thing to experience at the latest Glasgow venue to shut up shop and thus contribute to the cultural desertification that will come to characterise the Starmer-Farage era of Plague Island history. I came home happy with their new album and a cool tote.

At the GFT this week (support your local arts cinema, folks) I saw poultry-based Buster Keaton homage Hen (2026) and dull boomer around-the-world dalliance The Balloonists (2026). I liked them both!

The eyebrow-raising investigations at The Nerve by Cadwalladr and Company are brilliant. Get informed and then resist.

Physical form

Captured at the Sparkle Horse pub in Partick by Alan Dimmick whose new book is due in July:

Nothing says ‘Fuck Easter!’ like skipping the collection tray and purchasing a Bible stolen from some horrible road hotel!

I received your wonderful piss-yellow book by mail the other day, and read it in one sitting, or perhaps I should say one lying, as I was very much horizontal in the act.

What a treat! My incessant giggling was keeping my bed partner awake and so I was forced onto the couch for the night. And it was so worth it.

It is such a deliciously strange and hilarious story. You are a comedic genius. Thank you.

And here’s where to see what all the fuss is about.

Nominated for Best Feature Documentary at Wolverhampton Film Fest.