Manners maketh man...

... so where do allotments fit in? Find out here.

Ouch!

If you want to know what this instrument of torture has to do with Any Human Face, click here.

Link 7

East of the Web and Wordia have collaborated on a new project. It's called Link 7 and this is what East of the Web has to say about it:

In partnership with Wordia, the video dictionary, East of the Web presents Link 7, a series of stories linked by seven words:

case, fast, light, note, refuse, row, wound

Each story centers on one of the words and also contains the other six words somewhere in the text. Clicking on any of those words in a story will take you to another random story that centers on that word.

Explore the meaning of the seven words through the stories, or click on the 'Wordia' logo at the top of a story to hear an author define the story's word on video.

Link 7 contains stories by Alan Beard, Charles Lambert, James Ross, Sarah Salway and Kay Sexton along with many others.

...and up....

The second stage of SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE, my virtual tour to celebrate the publication by Salt of my short story collection The Scent of Cinnamon, has just been hosted by the writer and blogger extraordinaire Kay Sexton. You can find it here. Kay asked me some pretty challenging questions about... well, you'll just have to go and see...

Next week, I'll be answering questions from Scott Pack. Don't miss it.

And we're off...!

I'd like to draw your attention to Elizabeth Baines' blog today. For two reasons. Well three, actually. The first is that - unsurprisingly - it's one of the most stimulating blogs around, with a care and attention to what reading and writing are really concerned with that's unrivalled. But you already know that. The second is that she has officially kicked off the Something Rich and Strange virtual book tour, in which ten illustrious bloggers interview me about different aspects of my new collection of stories The Scent of Cinnamon and Other Stories. Salt Publishing is not only an extraordinary, and extraordinarily ongoing, act of courage and faith in both writers and readers, it's also a hotbed of brilliant ideas for making sure that books get into the right hands. The latest, Cyclone, the "home of virtual book tours", recognises the immense power of the web and of literary blogging and has harnessed that power to promote its publications. Tania Hershman's wonderful collection, Walking the White Road, is currently on tour, and I'm travelling, humbly, in her wake. Elizabeth's interview with me will be followed in a week's time by Kay Sexton's, at Writing Neuroses, in which I'll be talking about, among other things, ghosts, Look out for it.

The third reason is that Elizabeth has also written a typically generous and astute review of Little Monsters. What more could anyone ask?

Little Monsters: review and interview

Little Monsters has just been reviewed by Kay Sexton. You can find the review, followed by an interview with me, on Writing Neuroses, here. Kay's questions were challenging and fun, and I've done my best to answer them. I can do no more.

(There's also a photograph of me in my new desert boots pretending to read the book...)

Tags (2)

I've been tagged with the same task by two people, which suggests that the growth of a meme may not be exponential at all, but whatever the opposite of exponential is. In other words, the circle might get smaller and smaller until finally only I'm left. What a horrifying prospect. The taggers (and I'm honoured by their attention) are Linda Grant and Simon Barraclough. They've asked me to list six random facts about myself and then pass the task on to six other bloggers. Well, the first part is easier than the second. So let's start with that.

1. When I was a child I thought the word 'unyet' existed and was slapped for answering back when Mrs Fletcher, my teacher, told me it didn't. The primary school was so small we used to watch schools programmes on the TV in her living room, sitting in a circle on the floor with her Aberdeen terrier on the sofa behind us.

2. I have bags of second-hand clothes I've never even opened. (This random fact is being recycled from an earlier tagging exercise - I suspected it was, and checked. Why should it matter so much? A nod to Linda?)

3. I was once described as 'a small bearded man with one earring' by the Cambridge Evening News.

4. I have a genuine Roman tessera round my neck, made of blue glass and found in our garden beneath the big lemon tree. There's a display case in a nearby museum (in Sperlonga) in which hundreds of similar tesserae have been tipped, like Spangles, so it's precious but not that precious. It makes me wonder, though, what else there might be in the garden.

5. I'm currently editing a report on the control of the Armenian vole.

6. I was given a ride as a child in the Rolls Royce Silver Shadow used by Charlie Drake at a Royal Variety Performance. I'm not interested in cars now, and I wasn't then, so the reason I remember this must have something to do with Charlie Drake. I'd rather not think any more about this.

Now comes the hard part. I feel that I'm exhausting my tagging credit, but I'll give it a go.

Erin O'Brien

Kay Sexton

This should be Vanessa Gebbie, but she's declared herself a meme-free zone. How wise! But I can't think of anyone else....

Rachael King

Tyla Tingle

Elizabeth Baines (who tagged me some months back with a very similar meme: revenge is a dish best eaten cold!)

Christmas roast

The British press has been titillated these past few days over the pre-Christmas party organised by Manchester United players. It started off chastely enough, with drag queens and lap dancing, but subsequently adjourned to a hotel, entirely booked for the occasion, in the company of a hundred aspiring WAGs. As one journalist pointed out, you don’t book a hotel unless you intend to use the rooms. Six footballers (or five, according to your source; the actual number may or may not be academic) and one young woman did indeed use one of the rooms, apparently to their mutual satisfaction. It’s thanks to their sexual antics that large swathes of middle Britain are now acquainted with the more exotic meaning of roasting.
Marina Hyde, in the Guardian, commented, quite rightly in my opinion, that the footballers weren’t driven by passion or even lust – one in six is actually not that hot a ratio if you’re one of the six – but by their desire to emulate the internet porn that has taught them all they know about what men do with women. And yet. And yet.

I’ve also been on the receiving end of a group of men, fluidly numbered but at no time fewer than four. In my case, it wasn’t so much roasting as microwaving saveloys, but I don’t recall feeling humiliated or exploited, or even dirty. What I recall is being up for it in an eager, undiscriminating – OK, drunken – way. I was thirty, not seventeen, and the men I was with, in the loosest sense, were almost certainly not professional footballers, so my motives were almost certainly purer and more pondered than those of the aspiring Victoria Beckham in Room 101 (or whatever). Almost certainly. After all, I didn’t give head (or anything else) for a recording contract or the newest quilted handbag, the one that looks more like a shrunken anorak than an iconic fashion object (but what do I know?). I didn’t expect to be interviewed by Hello, or snubbed by Lindsay Lohan, or have my ‘life’ filmed for a Channel 4 documentary (though I wouldn’t have minded). I wasn’t after anything much beyond the moment, some time around 3 am on a Friday morning if I remember rightly, on my knees behind a laurel bush and, well, lapping it up in the most literal sense. I was happy, more than happy, to be there.

Maybe I had to be self-hating to find it fun, by which I mean radically naughty and thrilling and life-enhancing, but I did. And that’s the problem. Because I don’t think she did, the girl who was roasted in some hotel in Manchester and was happy because they’d said she was a good fuck. And I don’t think they did either, the would-be Jeff Strykers and John Holmeses, queuing for their go at whatever bit of her was free. And that’s a pity. Because if it isn’t fun, it’s not much more than a career move in a very crowded profession. It’s bags and shoes and interviews, assuming you can find your knickers.

Starving Makes it Fat

If you're feeling peckish for something throught-provoking and slightly creepy, try Kay Sexton's fabulous new story on East of the Web. It's called Starving Makes it Fat and it's a cracker (a high-fibre, low-fat cracker, naturally).