Dru, Steinbeck and the Book of Deer

Dear Juliet I think the 'flu's sweating itself out, thank God I washed the bedclothes last night. Even darned the socks the other day, looked at your pictures and felt a bit happier than I had for the last two years. Also sat up watching  Star Trek IV for fun after that fal-tor-pan (so to speak) last week. Darn, it's a good movie. They just don't make them like they used to... But I was struck by the way Kirk didn't quite know how to relate to the reconstituted Spock, who kept calling him Admiral . Kirk remembered how they'd painstakingly built up a friendship of mutual regard and respect ( despite the occasional slip ) years before and he wasn't quite sure how to handle this new and somewhat transformed version. It's a bit like this today. I used to call you dear Miss Landau, then it was Juliet. Occasionally Rose if I felt deeply emotional about something. Myself, I have always been a James, never a Jim, and no one's ever attempted Anthony although...

Dear Juliet "Who watches the watchmen?" (Juvenal) I was wondering how to make an interesting story out of being jabbed for Covid at the nearest clinic when Dr Mary Beard came on TV talking about her latest book, Talking Classics . I think I tried to contact her about the Book of Deer years ago and may even have got a reply, but it did remind me how much I liked using old quotes. That there are lessons we can quite easily learn from antiquity, though for sure we never do. Dallas. 22nd November 2013. With my usual luck plus a red-eye flight from Austin, I'd stumbled on the 50th anniversary commemoration of John F. Kennedy. It was one of the great days. I essentially covered it for the Huffington Post UK , wrote this article  and also took this photograph: Sadly, the script was taken from the text of a speech President Kennedy would have made at the Dallas Trade Mart later that day, but he didn't get there... You should be able to see the word "watchman" quite...

Dear Juliet Currently laid up and lugubrious, but I looked round the flat to find something to tell you about and came upon my book collection. I'm not reading much these days as the work needed to write Macnab was so murderous I liken the whole process (1996-2015) to this excerpt from Conan the Barbarian . Come to think of it, a friend once nicknamed me Conan the Librarian... I also felt like I was manacled to the word processor screaming, night after night for years. I once went out for a walk and found they'd put up several buildings in my absence. Macnab was rescued from the grave by my marvellous publisher in 2015 and with my improved skills I revised it fairly easily. Then I got the very last draft back from Amanda one dark night. She mentioned it just needed a few revisions. There were hundreds. I worked for eleven-and-a-half hours straight... If you consider the whole writing process to be like a brutal boxing match, I didn't even get to hide behind my jab and coa...

Dear Juliet I should have known. I spend the previous blog telling you I'm some sort of mutant superbeing who hardly ever gets ill, and I get ill! At times, I definitely do think God (if He exists) has quite the sense of humour... Admittedly, I usually get some minor bug April and October so perhaps that's it. I've also got my Covid jab coming on Thursday so prepare for a pretty incoherent blog that day. I don't get man 'flu so this isn't a pathetic attempt to get your sympathy. And I think we've been through this before. I had the same bug back in the Glasgow flat years ago. You had it, too, in Los Angeles. I ran out of clever words so I just told you I liked you. I think you liked that. Anyway, stumbled off to St Andrew's Church this morning, not for a service but for tea and biscuits. The locals have turned it into quite the community centre, so there's tea and biscuits on a Tuesday, lunch on Friday and a coffee shop most mornings. And after a fe...

Dear Juliet Well, I'm not chronologically thirty-five, of course. Born 4th September 1964 in Wolverhampton, 5.10 am (Mum had a willow pattern plate made), diagnosed with autism 2002 and you probably know bits of the rest. But then there's this other thing. Twice in my life, I've seen or read something which really struck a chord. The first time was when I read an article about Asperger's syndrome in 2001 And the second was when I watched Unbreakable . The simple concept, explained here by Samuel L. Jackson , is that if there are people who are always getting bugs, always down at the doctors', always moaning on about no' being well at one end of the spectrum, couldn't there be other people at the other end of the spectrum who don't get ill, who don't get hurt, and the thing is, they wouldn't even know it ... Not at first, anyway. I hardly ever get ill. I used to walk into my old Glasgow boxing gym in my forties, not bother to warm up and start w...

Dear Juliet I think I'll do that thing about my being thirty-five tomorrow (hope you're not dying of curiosity) as I was thinking more about another thing: that Somebody Up There Likes Us but He Stomps You Hard if You Go the Wrong Way... That's what it always felt like. That things were supposed to work out one way, and God help anyone who went in the wrong direction. I summed it all up in The Glorious 14th . And as the late and not-so-great Rolf Harris might say, "oh, and it makes me wonder..." Anyway... I wasn't born in Scotland. I was born in Wolverhampton when my parents were living in a small Shropshire town called Shifnal. I mentioned this the first time we met but I was on the biggest adrenalin trip of all time and pretty incoherent, you probably didn't hear and I had no reason to refer to it again. I intended to stay in Roberton, Scotland, but the independence referendum managed the massive job of making me change my perspective (could the tools ru...