Rainy day

One of my short stories has been published on Rainy City Stories; you can read it here. It's called Poster Girl and the action takes place in the Northern Quarter. All the pieces on Rainy City Stories are set in Manchester; if you've not had the pleasure, the site is an interactive literary cityscape with the poetry and prose marked a bit like pins on a map you get in TV cop shows. I also have a poem, Hawthorn Lane, on the site. I know: poetry! Crazy talk.

Submissions are now closed for Rainy City Stories, which is a shame, but the folk behind it are running a new project, The Real Story. Part of Manchester Literature Festival, the competition is for short creative non-fiction. See my earlier posting for details.

A moment of friction

(See what I just did there? The addition of one small letter from the last post I wrote. Cunning.)

That last post of which I speak was all about literary zines and groups who accept contributions. This one is about a "collaborative storytelling venture" of the graphic variety, Fractal Friction. I'll keep it brief, so you can go off and check it out for yourselves. FF currently has a merry band of six artists on board and each week publishes a page to a "comic book" artworked by one of the six. This week will see page 17 uploaded, so you can safely assume that the project has been running for 17 weeks. Anyway, submissions are invited - "we want to open it up to others, and there will be guest slots available", says the blog - just bung them an email to fractal.friction@googlemail.com if you're up for the challenge.


The page here (quite Howl's Moving Castle, I don't mind saying) is by Conor Boyle, through whom I found out about this Staedtler pen foray. Conor once had the loathsome task of being my next-door neighbour, adept at being polite at my pathetic attempts to see straight enough to manoeuvre a PlayStation handset. Poor Conor was also the mild-mannered janitor to a stinking fat cat and the lucky recipient of my prized pianoforte, which took a whole half a day and four grown people to push across the hall from one flat to the other. Mr B has quite a penchant for les bandes desinees, so if you check out his blogging profile at Pencilmonkeymagic, you'll find a ripe collection of links to other illustrators of both similar and also rather different works.

Feline groovy

I'm so behind on my blog duties that I wanted to do something quick and lighthearted, and then I saw this picture in a back issue of that free Stylist magazine.

These candy-coloured kitties are showing as part of an exhibition called Colour at the Michael Hoppen Contemporary gallery in that there London. I can't vouch for it (so don't go making a special journey then blame me if it's crap); I just liked the pusscats - I imagine them living with the late Dame Barbara Cartland on a fluffy pink cloud.

The blurb for the show gives the dictionary definition of the word colour ("that aspect of things that is caused by differing qualities of the light reflected or emitted by them, definable in terms of the observer or of the light") and the scientific description (hyperchromatism, wavelength, luminance, iridescence and purity). Look at them, getting in on my words act!

Pastel Cats by Tim Walker, courtesy Michael Hoppen Contemporary(on show in Colour until 9 Jan), C-type print, 20 x 30 inches

A rather Hockneyed way of looking at things

Today, I went on an exploratory tour of Liverpool with my mother. Included in our meander was a visit to the Walker because I wanted to see the Bridget Riley exhibition (more on that later this week) and my mother wanted to look at The Rise Of Women Artists, which includes a lot of Pre-Raph stuff, of which my mother, a former art teacher, is a big fan.

Anyway, while we were there, I took the opportunity to drag Mama, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century. I had been hoping to see one of David Hockney's swimming pool series, the cheeky (in more ways than one; see below) Peter Getting Out Of Nick's Pool (1966), but it's on loan to some place in Nottingham (shudder). This is a shame, but instead, and even better, the Walker has borrowed the picture Hockney did in 1970-71 of his fashion designer buddies Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell (find out more about the threesome here, about the picture here, and some more interesting bits and pieces here): Mr & Mrs Clark And Percy (who, presumably, is the cat). Wonderful!


My old next-door neighbours, who I miss a lot and can't really explain why, had Mr & Mrs Clark and Percy hanging in their lounge. Ossie Clark (not to be confused with wine-sozzled sod Oz Clarke, with whom you can have dinner soon, if you so desire, thanks to Manchester Confidential) was born in Warrington, where one of these neighbours worked, and the pair of them picked it up in a charity shop there, if I remember the story correctly. I like the picture, and the story, and I like the fact that someone from Warrington was a fashion guru.

A passing thought on Sesame Street

When I was 10, I moved house and had to change school. It was already apparent that we had gone up in the world because we now lived in a detached house and the neighbours didn't scream at each other after closing time and my dad no longer turned the hi-fi speakers round to face the party wall and blast out prog rock. Things were different now. Plus it was the 80s.

When I went to my new school, it was also apparent that we had gone up in the world. Everybody except me used fountain pens and had ink-stained fingers. I had a stubby bit of pencil and a rubber. Thankfully, I was quite good at spelling (imagine!) so at least my new classmates couldn't pick on me for being thick. Thankfully, too, my mum had persistently told me off for pronouncing things scousely so I didn't have too strong an accent.

One memory of many I have from the whole two years I spent at this school (others include: sneaking into the headmaster's office to look at the academic achievement records; learning all the songs from Cats, and having a massive war of words with a horrid girl called Kate) was sitting in a sun-filled room watching a video about grammar. There must have been a teachers' strike or a pandemic or something because a) there were loads of us in the room watching the tape and b) we never watched TV at this school; it was, of course, considered too low-brow.


What I remember from the show (which I'm pretty certain wasn't one of those schools and colleges productions but was in fact Sesame Street - happy 40th birthday Big Bird et al, BTW. Great show, guys) was the explanation of punctuation, and the memory aid for remembering the word itself (which adds to my confusion as to why we were watching this programme - weren't we a bit old?): Punk (accompanied by a sequence of a man with a mohican-style hairdo) - Chew (with a shot of bubblegum being masticated and blown) - Asian (footage of a person of Asian decent walking by). Crazy.

Righting the wrongs of apostrophe placement

If there's one thing you all know about me by now (and, in the words of the ginger-haired Manc one, if you don't know me by now, then you'll never ever know me. I sat next to him once in the "legendary" Hacienda, BTW. There's one to tell your grandchildren), it's that I'm a stickler for grammar rules. I get particularly peeved by the misuse of apostrophes, and believe on-the-spot fines should be introduced to weed out the worst offenders.

Imagine my joy, then, when my good friend technicalfault sent me this handy guide on How To Use An Apostrophe. And if you can't work out the correct usage of the popular punctuation mark after perusing this picture-plentiful tutorial, I will be contacting the authorities to revoke your A-star GCSEs! I'm serious. This is the power I wield.