Longform
Rees-Mogg and the New Depths
Just when you think that this Tory government couldn’t possibly sink any lower, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons, says this:
I think it is a real scandal that Unicef should be playing politics in this way when it is meant to be looking after people in the poorest, the most deprived, countries of the world where people are starving, where there are famines and where there are civil wars, and they make cheap political points of this kind, giving, I think, 25,000 to one council. It is a political stunt of the lowest order.
Unicef should be ashamed of itself.
– The Guardian’s Politics Live, Rees-Mogg accuses Unicef of ‘political stunt of lowest order’ after it funds food aid in UK
This in response the a news report that Unicef, the UN’s relief fund, is contributing money to help feed kids in Britain for the first time ever.
And the top-hatted tosspot thinks Unicef should be ashamed. We should all be ashamed; but the government most of all.
The Towers The Fields The Transmitters by David Keenan (Books 2020, 27)
Strange one, this. I read Keenan’s This is Memorial Device a couple of years ago, so when I saw a new one by him listed on my local bookshop’s ‘forthcoming’ page, I had a look.
That book was Xstabeth, and more on it in a few posts’ time. It hadn’t yet been released at the time, but there was a special offer from the publishers: upload proof that you had preordered it (such as the receipt from your local bookshop) and you’d get a free novella-length ebook prequel: The Towers The Fields The Transmitters.1
So I did all that, and here we are.
I’ll note right away that, having read both, they seem to be connected only by location and one tenuous, ambiguous, confusing event.
In fact those terms apply throughout this book. It’s kind of a magical realism piece, set mostly in St Andrews.2 A businessman visits the town to audit the books of a military facility, and starts trying to find his missing daughter. Why does he think she might be in St Andrews? That is never explained. Nor does it need to be.
Time goes weird, with second-world-war bombers appearing in the skies. Or on the phone, at least.
The more I try to write about this, the more it feels like a hallucination I had a few weeks ago. Very strange. Worth reading.
Stop Your Glasses Steaming Up by Sticking the Top of Your Mask to Your Face Using Micropore Tape
The problem
If, like all sensible people, you wear a mask over your mouth and nose when you go out these days; and if, like me and millions of others, you wear glasses; then you will have experienced your breath causing your glasses to steam up.
The cause is a fundamental flaw in mask design: the mask fabric makes a straight line from our cheeks to the bridge of our noses, leaving a gap between face and mask seam. Most of our out-breaths are directed that way, just by taking the path of least resistance.
Some masks have a wire insert that lets you mould the top section around your nose. I find that improves things, but is still imperfect. There are always gaps.
The Bigger Problem
This means that the masks are not as effective as they should be for their primary purpose. All that warm, damp air that’s condensing on our glasses is also the air that might be carrying virus particles.
So while this solution helps with the steamed-up glasses problem, it also helps to make masks more effective, by ensuring that more of our potentially-poisonous breath goes through the fabric.
The Solution
It’s quite simple: apply a strip of micropore tape to the section of the mask that goes over the bridge of your nose, and seal it down well.
Micropore tape is normally used for fixing dressings on wounds, so it’s designed to stick to skin and come off with minimal fuss (though see below).
The roll we had when I thought of this is quite wide, so I’ve been folding a piece over and attaching it to the inside of the mask (at @FranChats’s suggestion).
As you can see, it’s not attached very tidily, but we’re not in this for the aesthetics.
And it’s not actually visible when the mask is on.
The New Problems: Removal, and Sensitivity
Taking the taped mask off is the worst part, in my experience. I’ve been doing it quickly: take off my glasses (otherwise they might go flying across the room); unhook the ear loops and take a firm grip of them; close my eyes; then tug sharply forward.1
It can make your eyes water, but honestly, for clear vision outside on these cold days, it’s worth it.
Removing it slowly might be better for some people. And the whole thing will not be for some. If you have very sensitive skin, or get a reaction to the adhesive, then this won’t be for you. But if you can take it, I highly recommend it.
Lastly, my pictures show a reusable mask, but it works for disposables too.
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Though see my later post. I think I’ll be doing it slowly from now on. ↩︎
How to Make Sure You See My Posts
If you’re reading this, it may not apply to you, but I want to let you know that there are a number of ways to make sure that you see all of my posts. Should you wish to.
Now With Added Email
If you follow that link on the left labelled ‘Subscribe,’ you’ll see all the ways.
RSS, Twitter, Micro.blog, WordPress.com; no surprises there.
But if you prefer to use the oldest protocol of all (at least for these purposes), there’s a form on that page that will let you sign up to get the posts by email.
So now you never have to miss a post again.
Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail 72 by Hunter S Thompson (Books 2020, 26)
I thought it might be interesting, in this year of a US presidential election, to reread this account of a different reelection campaign of a terrible president.
In this one, of course, the president – Nixon – was successfully reelected. And it was only in his second term that he was impeached – or nearly so. He resigned first, and Ford, his veep, now president, pardoned him. It wouldn’t surprise me if Trump and Pence try the same sort of thing in the next couple of months.
This book doesn’t get as far as Nixon’s resignation. Thompson followed the Democratic campaign, and then George McGovern’s campaign once he got the nomination, as part of the press pack. He was National Affairs Editor for Rolling Stone at the time. A title and role that he created.
So this is essentially a fix-up of his columns, with some edits, and the odd footnote adding information that wasn’t available at the time. It’s classic HST, of course, with not quite as many illegal drugs as in some of his works.
The most intriguing thing in the whole book for me was this quote from p189:
For almost a year now, he [Pat Cadell] has been George McGovern’s official numbers wizard. Cadell and his Cambridge Research Associates have been working the streets and suburban neighborhoods in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts for McGovern, then coming back to headquarters on election nite [sic] and calling the results almost down to the percentage point…
Emphasis mine, ellipsis his. I’m just struck by the name of the organisation, and the fact that they’re doing a not dissimilar thing to Cambridge Analytica – in terms of analysis, if not manipulation – in a pre-computer age. There doesn’t seem to be any connections between the two organisations.
On the very next page we have this:
Even reading and watching all the news, there is no way to know the truth – except to be there.
Which resonates profoundly in today’s ‘fake news’ world.
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Books 2020, 25)
Read this for my course. It’s very good, unsurprisingly. Historical fiction isn’t usually my thing (Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle notwithstanding) It has a striking stylistic tic – if that’s the right word – in the way she refers to Thomas Cromwell. It’s always ‘he said,’ or ‘he did such-and-such’; very occasionally, for clarity, ‘he, Cromwell…’ But never just, ‘Cromwell said…’
Not a big deal, but in a work of this size, it stands out. It feels significant. And it is; ’tic’ is the wrong word for something so definite, so chosen. Mantel has said that she wanted the viewpoint to be ‘over Cromwell’s shoulder.’ So ‘he’, rather than ‘Cromwell.’
One of the most subtle things about it as how Cromwell switches from just being an advisor to the king to rounding up certain priests, and I don’t really understand how it happened. It’s a masterpiece of characterisation.
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (Books 2020, 24)
I wasn’t quite sure about this at first. I know it won awards and all that. It was assigned for the ‘Genre’ module of my Creative Writing masters,1 but it didn’t immediately grab me.
But I came round to it. It’s set in the very far future, because there are examples of technology that is old, but people don’t understand it. Reminiscent of Viriconium or Against A Dark Background in that way. And ‘Home is the pink one’ – star – suggests that Sol has got very old. Like, billions of years older than now. Which feels wrong, because humans should have changed a lot more in that time.
The titular character is the first of her people to leave Earth (we assume it’s Earth, anyway) to go to Oomza University, which appears to be a whole planet that’s a university, and takes people from many different species and civilisations.
Things happen on the way, as you might expect. It’s good, and I’m keen to read the sequels.
Masters Update
We’re halfway through the first term of my Creative Writing masters course. Those five weeks went fast, but 2020 is The Year When Time Was Weird, for everyone. How is it going, you ask.1
Pretty well, thanks. At first glance, with only two actual sessions, the workload looked light. But as is common with postgraduate courses, you have a lot of work to do on your own. Add to that, it’s a writing course: we have to write, and you can’t do that while sitting in a class.
Or you could, for small exercises, and I think maybe they would be asking us to do that kind of thing if this were a conventional year and we were sitting in a seminar room in Bloomsbury. It is, however, the most unconventional of years, and we are sitting in our own homes on Microsoft Teams.
There are two modules. Everyone does the Writing and Reading Seminar, where we focus on short stories. Each week we read and discuss two or three assigned stories, with there being a theme or area of focus: Character, Voice, Territory, for example. Then we workshop pieces submitted by three members of the class. Everyone gets to submit a piece of up to 4000 words, twice this term.
For my first piece I decided to get out of my comfort zone (such as it is) and write a purely realist piece. No spaceships, no magic; no element of the fantastic whatsoever. I think it worked out pretty well.
Those pieces are not assessed, but in January we have to submit a 4000-word piece that will be. I only recently learned that this piece has to be a reworking of one of the two pieces we’ll have workshopped in class. I don’t think I’d have done anything differently, but I would have liked to have known that sooner.
The second module I’m doing is called Contemporary Writing 2: Genre2, or just ‘Genre.’ We spend two weeks on each of these genres: crime, science fiction, historical fiction, and young adult fiction.3 There’s a novel assigned for each one. The first week has a two short, prerecorded lectures, and in the seminar we discuss those, and techniques, and the assigned novel.
For the second week we each write a 1000-word piece in the genre in question, and some of us have the pieces workshopped. We got to choose the genres in which we wanted to be workshopped. I chose SF and crime. Even those of us who aren’t being workshopped in a given week have our pieces discussed on the class forum.
So as you can see, there’s quite a lot of reading, analysis, and commenting, as well as actual writing.
I’m enjoying it a lot, but if you were to ask me what I’ve learned, I’m not sure I could specify that yet. However, the practice, the fact of looking at my own writing and that of others, professionally-published and not, in great detail: that alone is bound to improve my writing, I feel.
Right now it’s reading week. I don’t recall having such a thing back when I was an undergraduate, but maybe we did. They’re standard now, just like half-term breaks at school.4 So we have no classes, and some extra short stories to read, and time to catch up on the novels. I finished Wolf Hall yesterday, so I only have The Hate U Give to read for YA. Plenty of time to get some writing done.
Oh, and a couple of homework assignments, too. All work is homework, of course.
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I’m always confused about how you should punctuate that idiom. I’m asking a question: it needs a question mark. But neither of these look right:
- How is it going? you ask.
- How is it going, you ask?
It should really be:
- ‘How is it going?’ you ask.
But that makes it too much like I’m writing dialogue in a a second-person narrative, and it doesn’t really fit with the overall feel of a blog post.
The way I’ve written it above has no question mark at all, and that can’t be right. ↩︎
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I’ve yet to learn what ‘Contemporary Writing 1’ is, or was, or if there ever was one. ↩︎
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I’d argue that YA is a target market, not a genre, but never mind. ↩︎
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It was during my primary school years that Scotland introduced the week-long half-term break in October. ‘The October Week,’ as it was called, and it was definitely a new thing at the time. I was aware of it particularly because my Mum was a primary school teacher. I can’t find any evidence of it now, because there are so many other pages about half-term holiday dates and history projects for October half term. But if my memory is not totally faulty, that’s the truth of it. ↩︎
When Election Night Went On For Days
For the first time in my life (apart from occasional odd minutes in hotels on business trips) I’m watching CNN. It’s 5am on the US east coast, 3am on the west; yet every few seconds, it seems like, we get this:
Sometimes, too, there’s an actual advert, but luckily I’ve been able to scrub through them.
The actual coverage is good, though. They’re providing good information, lots of details. They’re also calling out Trump’s lies, as is the proper thing to do.
Of course, since most of the time there’s nothing much happening, they’re having a hard time of it.
We remain gripped.
Writing About Writing About Typography
Robin Rendle writes about writing about typography, but he has lessons for all of us who want to write well.
Though I don’t entirely agree with his viewpoint about the particular sentence he criticises. Here it is:
A revival is based on historical models, made suitable for contemporary use, adapted to the typographical and technical needs of today, but nevertheless relies on a personal response to the historical style.
– The Rosart Project, The Rosart Project
The ‘revival’ it’s talking about involves recreating old typefaces, and/or building new versions of them. It’s from a site called The Rosart Project, set up by some students of typography.
Rendle’s essay at an improved version of that sentence is this:
Type designers will often look at letterforms that were made in the past and then redraw them for modern day use. This is called a “revival” by the type community but I like to think of it as a remix: a type designer will unavoidably apply their own style and harmonies, their own deviations and melodies to the song.
Every remix is different, every remix is important.
– Robin Rendle, Writing about Typography
Which is certainly brighter, has a bit more sparkle, and arguably is easier to understand. But I don’t think the original is that bad. Certainly not as bad as Rendle thinks. He says:
what does any of this mean? The words make sense but it’s written in a style that’s familiar to anyone that reads about the field of typography. It’s what’s known to folks outside the field as “academic writing” but it’s what I consider to simply be bad writing—it’s waffling and unclear.
– Robin Rendle, Writing about Typography
It’s what is often called dry, I’d say, certainly compared to the alternative. But I don’t think it deserves quite the fire he brings to it. Of course he’s only doing it – he says, and I believe him – because he loves the project, and wants to ‘see the whole typographic community break the shackles of this style of writing.’
Which is fair enough. I’d certainly rather read a piece in Rendle’s style than much academic writing. So I guess maybe I do agree with him after all. His final advice to the typographic community could apply just about anywhere where words are used:
write to swoon, to convince, to make a stranger fall in love. Abandon the academic style, because it’s making your beautiful work so very boring.
– Robin Rendle, Writing about Typography
The Secret Place by Tana French (Books 2020, 23)
Crime fiction set in Dublin. In a posh boarding school, specifically, which causes it to have elements of young adult (YA) fiction. We studied it for the ‘Genre’ module of my MA course. It also dips into magic realism, so it’s particularly appropriate for that module.
I hadn’t read any of French’s books before. This is volume five in a series about the Dublin Murder Squad, but they’re only loosely linked. I enjoyed it a lot, and wouldn’t mind reading more.
She has a great way with colour imagery, and compelling characters.
In the Sky With Diamonds
This is stone-cold genius. Making diamonds out of carbon dioxide from the air, solar and wind power, and rainwater:
UK millionaire Dale Vince says lab-grown gems will be ‘world’s first zero-impact’ diamonds
…
“Making diamonds from nothing more than the sky, from the air we breathe – is a magical, evocative idea – it’s modern alchemy,” said Vince. “We don’t need to mine the earth to have diamonds, we can mine the sky.”
– Jillian Ambrose, Ecotricity founder to grow diamonds ‘made entirely from the sky’
‘Sky Diamonds’ is a great name for the company, but I feel he’s missing an obvious Beatles tie-in.
Wheeling the Reinvention
Dave Winer has ideas:
ideas for rethinking blogs and feeds. I found, as others have, that I need another kind of document to include in my personal CMS other than a story that’s part of the blog. Everything about blogs are set up to be written, then lightly edited, and never touched again. It’s temporal writing. But there are other things that I want to develop over time, keep coming back to, revising. A few years back I started this.how to hold those docs.
– Dave Winer, Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 16:05
He’s talking about what I like to call ‘web pages,’ surely? You don’t need any fancy CMS for those, as Dave of all people should know. And if you want to use such a thing, well, even WordPress has its Posts/Pages distinction.
Colliding Names
A few years ago I wrote about how I was notified about the wrong band called (The) Nails. In that case the names were different, though only by the subtle presence or absence of the definite article. Things have got even more confusing recently.
I have an app on my phone called Music Harbor (sic). The idea is, you give it access to your music library, and it notifies you of forthcoming releases by artists you already have tracks by. It sometimes throws up some oddities, like people I’ve never heard of just because they’re ‘featured’ on something I have. But mostly it’s pretty good. It’s how I know that Bruce Springsteen has a new album coming out in a few days, for example.
A few years back I heard a track called ‘Bass Down Low,’ by someone called Dev. I liked it, both musically and lyrically. I mean, it’s not profound, but ‘I like my beats fast and my bass down low’ is a sentiment I can get behind.
So there was a new track by Dev out today. However, the guy rapping on ‘El Erb’, is not, I feel sure, Dev, the female singer & rapper of ‘Bass Down Low.’
It’s also a scunner of a name to search for, what with it being an abbreviation for developer, the TV show, and Google completely owning the .dev top-level domain.
Multiple people with the same name: it’s a problem. It’s why actors have Equity names, I guess.
Still, there should be no problem with the early nineties Scottish indiepoppers Bis, right? Who’d have thought they’d be back with a new single, this long after ‘The Secret Vampire EP’?
No-one, it turns out. This Bis is someone else (and his single ‘Streets’ is also nothing to do with The Streets).1 It’s also hard to search for, not least because it’s an abbreviation for several different organisations. I even used to work for a company called BIS.
I don’t think the English language is running out of names, but if you’re planning on using a short one as your professional persona or brand, you probably want to check out whether or not someone has already used it in your field. Though it’s not always that easy, as I’ve noted.
There’s even a music magazine called Clash, which has nothing to do with The Clash.
Still, ‘Sugar sugar kandy pop/Push it down and pull it up,’ as I’m sure we can all agree.
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Shit, and I’ve just found out he was murdered last year. ↩︎
Covid Track
This is one of our local parks. Look at that desire-line track, fading into the distance (click or tap on the picture to see it bigger).
The paved footpath is off to the right. That track – a simple, direct route, that avoids the footpath – wasn’t there a year ago. The novel coronavirus changes the landscape.
Not Discworld, Not Batman
Neil Gaiman makes great use of metaphor to criticise BBC America’s The Watch:
It’s not Batman if he’s now a news reporter in a yellow trenchcoat with a pet bat.
– Neil Gaiman, quoted in The Guardian
Though I’d watch that series.
When the Going Gets WEIRD
In the New York Times Daniel C Dennett reviews a book by Joseph Henrich called The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Sounds like an interesting book, and the review itself is engaging. I just wanted to note a few points.
First, we have the acronym WEIRD, which stands for “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.” Apparently being WEIRD makes us weird, in psychological terms. Non-WEIRD and WEIRD people have differences that can be observed, measured.
I was intrigued by this quote:
To point to just one striking example: Normal, meaning non-WEIRD, people use left and right hemispheres of their brains about equally for facial recognition, but we WEIRD people have co-opted left-hemisphere regions for language tasks, and are significantly worse at recognizing faces than the normal population. Until recently few researchers imagined that growing up in a particular culture could have such an effect on functional neuroanatomy.
– Daniel C Dennett, Why Are We in the West So Weird? A Theory
I wonder if this can apply on an individual scale: are people whose focus has been language less able to recognise faces? Answering just from within my own head, I’d say maybe? I’ve been what my Dad used to call a compulsive reader all my life, as well as being at least somewhat interested in writing, and I’m very poor at facial recognition. Bordering on prosopagnosia, I sometimes think (though far from anything like the poor woman in this story, who can’t even recognise herself in a mirror).
If my experience suggests that, I have counter examples right in my own family. My beloved and our daughter are both linguists, and both border (to my mind) on being super recognisers1, which is the complete opposite of me.
None of which tells us anything useful, except maybe that the ability to recognise faces, like many things, exists on a scale.
More interestingly, Dennett introduces (to me, at least) the delightful term ‘Occam’s Broom’:
A good statistician (which I am not) should scrutinize the many uses of statistics made by Henrich and his team. They are probably all sound but he would want them examined rigorously by the experts. That’s science. Experts who don’t have the technical tools — historians and anthropologists especially — have an important role to play as well; they should scour the book for any instances of Occam’s broom (with which one sweeps inconvenient facts under the rug).
– Daniel C Dennett, Why Are We in the West So Weird? A Theory
Occam had a famous razor; why wouldn’t he have a broom as well?
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There’s a professional body of super recognisers. Who’d have thought? ↩︎
Orlando by Virginia Woolf (Books 2020, 22)
This is a book about history, biography, gender – and writing.
It’s presented as a biography of the titular character, who starts as the son of a noble family. It’s written for, and partly based an the life of, Woolf’s friend Vita Sackville-West.
Famously, Orlando’s gender (or biological sex) changes partway through the novel. She spends the latter part of it as a woman. She also lives for four or five hundred years – and presumably is living still. She’s barely got started by the end of the book.1
The interesting thing about the time difference is that he/she doesn’t experience the passage of hundreds of years, as far as we are shown. It’s like time passes at a different rate for her. She reaches the age of around 30, but the world has moved on through ages around her.
I enjoyed this greatly, and as I said a while back, it sparked some ideas and made me think of associations with Iain Banks. Which can’t be bad.
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Indeed she/he turns up in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, switching back and forth seemingly at random. ↩︎
How I'm Going To Master this Writing Lark
Announcing a big life change: I’m going to be starting a masters course in a couple of weeks. An MA in Creative Writing, at Birkbeck, University of London.
Nine Months in Slippers
“How did you get here, Martin?” I hear you ask. Let me take you back to November last year. I lost my job. The reasons are obscure and not that interesting, but I had been working at SPIKA for only six months, and suddenly I was out on the street.1
If that had happened a couple of months sooner, I might have been studying all this time. I had been vaguely musing on the idea of doing a masters in journalism. I love to write, and I sometimes think that I kind of missed a calling.
I was too late for 2019, all the university terms having already started. So I did a bit of job hunting, but mainly took a break till after Christmas.
When this year that we had no idea was going to be so terrible started, I started looking for jobs, but I also kept thinking about journalism. I started a distance-learning course. Learned a bit of shorthand, and read up on some of the other aspects of the craft. A journalism MA, starting this year, was still on the table.
Then Coronavirus arrived.
To be honest, the lockdown didn’t change things that much for me: I was at home all the time anyway. But the jobs market, as well as the rest of the world, was affected. It’s easy to work from home in software development, but recruitment was down. I had a few interviews, but no success.
Then somewhere in there I decided that journalism wasn’t for me after all. There are aspects of the profession that didn’t appeal to me: newsgathering and all that side of it, essentially. I’d like to be a columnist or maybe a feature writer, but not so much a reporter. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a terrible time for journalism, with newsrooms laying people off and cutting back.
I kept looking for jobs back in software development. But after a bit, Frances said, “Why don’t you do a masters in your own field?” It was a good idea: it would be intellectually stimulating, and possibly improve my employability. I started looking at courses.
Computer science itself (I’ve never formally studied it), or one of the various data science options? Both had their merits. Either would have been interesting and mentally challenging.
But they didn’t spark joy, to use a tidiness-related term that seems appropriate. I looked at the course outlines, and they were interesting enough, but I could tell I wouldn’t have loved doing them.
There were other subjects, though, and one kept prodding my mind; one that did offer the prospect of joy, the possibility that I would love it.
Like I said, I love to write.
Choosing
Quite a few institutions offer creative writing MAs, in various forms. I applied to all of them. All the ones in London, anyway, and a few others that offer distance learning. Each needed a personal statement and a sample of writing. Every single one had unique requirements of the sample, in terms of word length and type of piece. Royal Holloway, for example (who rejected me), wanted a short story extract and, uniquely, a piece of critical writing. Most just wanted the fiction.
There were differences in the course titles, too. London Met’s was ‘Creative, Digital, and Professional Writing.’ Westminster’s was ‘Creative Writing: Writing the City,’ though they had closed entry for this year.
City, University of London has several. But the plain ‘Creative Writing’ was showing a message to the effect of ‘Applications suspended.’ I emailed to ask if this meant that they were full for the year, and was told that no, they had suspended entry for 2020 because there wasn’t enough interest. So I applied for another one they have, ‘Creative Writing and Publishing.’ They got back to me after a few days and said the course was full. Seems to be a slight disconnect there, maybe?
I got offers from London Met, Kingston (by distance learning), and Birkbeck. Birkbeck were the only ones who interviewed me first (I still haven’t heard back from several, and Glasgow’s website was too broken to let me apply – and they didn’t reply to my query). And just today, Teeside, another distance learning one, offered me a place. Far, far too late. I shouldn’t criticise, though, since I was very late in applying.
For a variety of reasons I decided Birkbeck was the best of the offers, not least that I liked Julia Bell, the course leader, who interviewed me from her shed. Birkbeck is ‘London’s evening university.’ It was set up to provide adult education to people who are working. All the classes are in the evenings.
Why, and Why Now?
This is probably something I should have done thirty years ago, but we didn’t know about masterses back then. Well, I didn’t, anyway. And I don’t think creative writing masters courses existed at all.2 Anyway, as the saying more or less has it, the best time was then; the second-best time is now.
Will it help me be a better writer? I damn well hope so. Beyond that, we’ll have to wait and see.
And Beyond…
What comes after this? In an ideal world I’ll make my living as a writer. I’m well aware how hard that is to achieve, though, so I might end up going back to programming. The best might be some sort of hybrid. We’ll see, but I’m not going to worry too much about it for the next year or so.
One thing I do plan to do is to blog about the course as I do it, so expect to see more here.
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Specifically Victoria Street, Westminster. It was a very convenient office for popping down to Parliament Square to protest illegal proroguing. ↩︎
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A little research tells me the famous UEA one started in 1970, so I’m wrong there. ↩︎
How Johnson’s Lawbreaking Plans Will Harm the UK
Here’s a Twitter thread (readable on a single page here) that clearly explains how the prime minister’s plans to break international law will damage UK/EU relations, endanger peace in Ireland, and of course, harm the UK’s position in the world.
Is it possible to charge the prime minister with treason?