It’s January 2025. I live in Glasgow, but I’m writing to you from my Montreal volcano lair. 🌋
I just got back from a performance of The Nutcracker (it was a girls’ night out but one of them got sick) and then played a largely useless part in a minyan. How are you?
2024 was a busy year for me, so I’m taking some time off now. It’s a proper months-long sabbatical in which I’m doing very little.
And yet I dabble.
Projects
The edit continues on our film, but I’m not an active participant in that. What I do at the moment is text back “excellent!” when a new cut comes in.
I’m futzing with the novel I started last year. It will be published mid-year, in a mysterious way with no blurb, synopsis or cover design.
I’m editing, for publication but without deadline, the diaries of an English dandy.
Submissions for New Escapologist Issue 18 trickle in for release in December. Thanks for your patience on that front.
Reading
Two-Headed Doctor: Looking for Ghosts in Dr. John’s Gris-Gris by David Toop (Strange Attractor, 2024)
Love Junkie by Robert Plunket (New Directions, 1992/2024).
Travel
I’m preparing for a leisurely trip to Paris this month to see Jenny and Landis.
I’m dreaming of a trip to Stockholm and Helsinki in April, but I’m not yet sure I have the airfare.
Samara and I are planning a June trip to Italy.
I just bought tickets for my third visit to Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht in November.
Culture I’ve Been Enjoying
Librarie Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal is a magical land
Kuts by Gamma Knife
Sky Peals in a concretey motorway service station.
Robert Eggers’ (like a bird’s eggers) Nosferatu
Our pub quiz nemesis, the wool historian Karie Westerman, is the Captain of this year’s Open University team on University Challenge. She’s doing really well but my team keeps kicking her team’s ass in real life. Make of that what you will.
I prefer this Open University anyway.
Physical Form
Here’s what I look like /
at the start of the year /
in my snuggly and delightful /
Montreal gear:
Old Now pages (Then pages?) are squirreled pointlessly into the Now Page Archive