Warhorses of Letters

Remember when I got all millitant about Warhorse? I'm about to get more millitant.  And slightly more millitary.

Ages ago I raved about a literary night I'd been to in Kilburn, called Tall Tales.  Among the things I said about it were this:

We were privy to the early stages of an ill-fated equine love affair, conducted entirely by letters. Hints came which suggested there could be a sequel to this at some point; I really really hope there is. 

Various circumstances mean I haven't been to Tall Tales forever, but from all accounts it is going from strength to strength.  They now have a podcast and a website and Toby Davies is still writing brilliant stories which sometimes feature excellently named cats. 

Which is all very exciting for everyone involved, I'm sure.  But the very very exciting news is that wishes sometimes do come true. Warhorses of Letters - the story of the love affair between Napolean's horse Marengo, and Wellington's horse Copenhagen, is going to be broadcast on Radio 4; starting from next week and running for four weeks. 

And that's not even the most exciting part.  The most exciting part is the casting. 
Daniel Rigby is playing Copenhagen, and the part of Marengo is being played by Stephen Fry. Stephen actual Fry.

That's right.  Stephen actual Fry will be on the radio next week, playing a love-struck French horse.  What's not to love? Having heard early versions of the first two installments, let me add the following rider: this would be worth a listen even if it didn't feature Stephen actual Fry.* But since it does, you'd be mad not to tune in.

By now you must be wondering how. If you are in the UK you can hear the first installment of Warhorses of Letters next Tuesday (October 25th) at 11pm.  Also if you are in the UK- more specifically London, more specifically north-west-ish London - you can see the next Tall Tales at the Good Ship in Kilburn on November 24th.  (Unless, annoyingly, you are me.  I can't make this one either.  Don't let that put you off.)   In the meantime, if you live ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD** you can listen to Warhorses of Letters on the iPlayer, from October 25th onwards.

If all that still hasn't convinced you, I should probably mention that co-writer Robbie Hudson  currently appears to be suffering from a very manky-looking, tea-related foot injury.  Surely that deserves a sympathy vote.

*HA! Rider! I didn't even mean to make a joke.


** Also if you are in London.

I've always felt that August is over-rated

See also: September.  I mean, who wants to read anything in those stupid months?

October is where it's at.  I mean, October is where I'm at - as are the rest of you, presumably - and it's sort of caught me by surprise.  Once again I'm caught in the trap of knowing it's not really the done thing to apologise for lack of posts but desperately wanting to acknowledge that I've been, well, a bit crap.

For what it's worth,  I do have some genuine excuses this time.  Especially if you are willing to overlook the fact that I was on holidays for most of August.


First, I have moved house.  Now, instead of living on my own in a shoebox in the middle of nowhere, I am renting out said shoebox and sharing a place near Waterloo with a friend.   If I had been blogging in August, chances are that anything you read would have been a variation on the theme of OH MY GOD!! LIVING IN CENTRAL LONDON IS SO AMAZING!! I CAN SEE THE LONDON EYE FROM MY LIVING ROOM!!!  I LOVE MY NEW FLAT!!! OH MY GOD LOOK, YOU CAN STILL SEE THE LONDON EYE FROM MY LIVING ROOM!! And etcetera.   This is pretty much all that the people I know in real life have managed to get out of me for the last few months.

(I quite like my new flat.  The people who know me in real life are all now VERY aware of this. You're quite lucky if you're not one of them.*)

Excuse number two is this:  my new blog.  Because that's exactly what someone without enough time, will-power or inclination to update their blog should do: start another one. Seriously though: if you like wine or books or, even better, wine AND books, please do stop by. Despite appearances, it's an 'as well as', not an 'instead of' project, in theory at least.

Excuse numbers three four and five are the usual: other writing, part-time day-job, trying to figure out exactly what I plan to do with the rest of my life. You know the drill. Oh, and my Mum was in town for a while.  That counts, yes?

Anyway.  None of this, interesting as it may be, is the reason I stopped by.  That is still to come in a different post. I bet the suspense is killing you.


*Although you might already be as sick as they all are of hearing about how amazing my new flat is.  But since you're here already and we're on the subject, I may as well tell you:  I can also see the London Eye from my bedroom.  Also,  if you stand in exactly the right spot in our two-windowed living room, you can see the London Eye from one of them and The Shard out of the other.  In the first week that I lived here, I was so excited by the fact that we had views of the London Eye that I completely failed to notice we could even see The Shard.

Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way

was this year's winner of the Diagram Prize for the oddest book title of the year.

Previous winners include: Living with Crazy Buttocks, Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, How to Avoid Huge Ships, and Highlights in the History of Concrete.

The prize was established in 1978 and the innaugural winner was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.  More recently, a book called Cheese Problems Solved made the 2007 shortlist but lost out to eventual winner If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs.

This Day in History

"1932: Rockabilly singer Sleepy LaBeef born."

I expect I’m not the only one who read that and immediately needed to know more about Mr LaBeef.

Sleepy is 6’7’’ tall, comes from a place called Smackover (it’s in Arkansas) and grew up on a melon farm. After a brief stint as a gospel singer he started recording rockabilly and country songs; his biggest hits were Every Day and Blackland Farmer which reached #73 and #67 in the charts respectively.  In between records he found time to star in a horror movie called The Exotic Ones.*

Live performances are what Sleepy is really all about.  He began recording in 1957 and has been on the road more or less ever since, except for in 1977 when his bus caught fire. From his website: “he still performs two hundred shows a year and plays with such energy that people a third of his age are annihilated when they attempt to keep up with him.”


People seem to like him. The Detroit Metro Times says “He possesses one of the most distinctive and compelling baritone voices ever to be heard in rock”.  Someone else ( I forget who, and don't have time to check) described it as a voice which can rattle windows.  And from the Los Angeles Herald Examiner: “Some music cooks, LaBeef roasts."



*Also called The Monster and The Stripper. Sleepy played a swamp monster.

The Russian Fairytale Wars

When Russia and Ukraine argue, which is basically all of the time,  it usually has something to do with gas supplies.  But now they've found something much more fun to squabble about. 

The Russians have produced a national fairytale map which features thirty-odd characters from popular folklore and traces their origins to various parts of Russia. Which would be fine, except that the Ukranians already had their own map and it features some of the same characters. 

At the centre of the controversy is Kolobok, a plucky currant bun who skips through the forest to avoid being eaten greeedy monsters.  The Russians say he comes from the Ulyanovsk region (also the home of Vladimir Lenin who the BBC describe as
"less cute, though more revolutionary" than Kolobok.  And to think people worry that the BBC is dumbing down.)  Meanwhile the Ukranians say Kolobok is one of their own, and are quick to point out that 'kolo' is a Ukranian word meaing 'round'.  Then again, apparently 'kolob' is a Russian word meaning 'round dough', so who knows which side to believe.  No one seems to be laying claim to Vladimir Lenin.

I sort of like the fact that they're arguing about this.   Partly because it's funny to imagine a currant bun running through a forest, but mainly because people only argue over things they consider valuable.  It's easy to measure the value of gas pipe-lines and their contents; much harder to put a dollar amount on stories and mythologies.  It's easy to forget that this doesn't make them any less important.  Or valuable.  

Of course we'll probably never know who had the story first, and it may well have orginated somewhere else entirely - there's a gingerbread man version as well, remember, as well as endless other variations - but that's not really the point.

Been a while.......

I had dinner with a friend and old work colleauge a few weeks ago.  He told me that he had - and this is a direct quote -  "checked the blog first, so we'd have something to talk about".  I'm not sure what he found more disappointing - the fact that I'd written nothing new since April, or the prospect of an entire evening spent discussing mackerel.

There's no particular reason why it's been so long since my last post.  Except maybe that the longer I took to get around to writing something, the harder it became.  Sort of like one of those friendships which dies a natural death because you both leave it too long to get in touch, until it's been so long since you were in touch that it would feels awkward if you did, so you don't. 
 
Now of course I'm faced with the scary propsect of having to write what is essentially a "come-back" post,  which by definition ought to be significant, or brilliant, or at the very least worth the wait.

This one is none of those things.  Essentially it's just me checking in to make sure that I don't leave it for so long that I stop all together.   Life is busy, and good - very good.  I don't have Olympic tickets but I am going to Wimbeldon next week, and last week I learned to make a bloody mary out of absinthe, veal jus and wasabi flying fish roe, and in twenty-something sleeps it's time for Latitude again, and I'm juggling several writing projects I'm quite excited about, and I'm moving house soon, and I've become involved with a fantastic charity doing really fun things, and......well, you get the picture.  Lots of good things going on.   Plus my little brother - who will always be my little brother - became a dad about a month ago.  So I'll have a new niece to meet next time I'm in Australia. She's very cute.  And we share a name (my first name is her middle name), which still makes my insides melt whenever I remember.

So, as I said, life is good.  I'm pretty lucky.  No - very lucky. REALLY very lucky.

 I'm not promising to be back with any sense of regularity, at least not for the next month or so, but I'm still around.  Let's stay friends, shall we?

What's with all the mackerel?

I am a bit obsessed with Tube station facts.  One of my favourites is that more of the London Underground is above ground than under ground. 

The other day someone told me that Ohio is the only American state which doesn't contain any of the letters in the word mackerel.  It made me sit up, because I'm sure I've head a similar fact about Tube stations; namely that there is only one tube station which doesn't have any letters in common with the word mackerel.  *

I find this interesting, mildly, but the question which I find much more interesting and which has been burning a massive hole in my brain ever since  is WHAT'S WITH ALL THE MACKEREL?

Google isn't helping.  It's telling me a lot of other things about mackerel, like that the French word for mackerel (maquereau) is slang for a pimp, and all sorts of recipes for cooking them (mackerel stuffed ravioli, anyone?), but not why or how it became a linguistic yardstick of sorts.  It's driving me nuts.

*Or at least there used to be.  It was St John's Wood; but now there's Hoxton on the new East London line and that doesn't have any of them either.  Or any letters from the word badger, for what it's worth.