Look at the new Interzone: it’s a paperback book! I like it.

I’ve written here before about Nick Cave’s newsletter, The Red Hand files, and lately I’ve taken — slightly hyperbolically, perhaps — to saying that I think it might be his greatest creation. Today’s issue knocks it right out of the park.

He writes about worrying about singing flat, because he’s going to duet with Johnny Cash. Even Nick Cave worries about not coming up to the mark. And then — well, just read it.

And in the last paragraph, after the signoff, he introduces another hero of mine, just in passing.

Wonderful.

I just crossed the 80,000 word mark on Casino Soul, the novel that I started as part of my creative writing masters in January 2021. Nearly finished (I keep thinking).

When you end the week with a massive merge to master, and then go downstairs to drink wine and listen to Ziggy Stardust. Hello.

A rare trip into the office today. We have the Christmas do for London-based developers and testers tonight. A little late. But that’s the way these things go sometimes.

London commuters have largely forgotten Covid ever happened, it seems.

Currently reading: Poems by Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod 📚

Us old types are told that youngsters don’t like punctuation. Full stops in texts sound angry, etc. But I find an unpunctuated message incomplete. You’re left hanging, waiting for the rest. I just got a message at work that said:

Great

Great what? Balls of fire?

It’s the 31st of January, and daffodils are out.

The first snowdrops are out in London.

Went for the first swim of the year this morning. And if the app for the pool is to be believed, I haven’t been since March last year (not counting holidays). That whole ‘work getting in the way of things’ I was talking about yesterday. Or being a good excuse, at least.

They had a sign up warning that the pool temperature was only 23.7°C. It was fine once I got going, though.