Writers & writing: books, movies, art & music – the bits & pieces of a (retiring) writer’s life
Visit the blog here.
I’ve been writing a blog for a number of years now. The first, Mellotone70Up, ran from 2009 to 2014; the current blog, Some Days You Do …, began shortly after and is still running.
But what is it? And why?
The best way to describe it is to say it’s partly a diary, partly a memoir. An attempt to pin down and better understand things that interest me now, while occasionally looking back over the past. My past. And what kind of things?
There are quite a few pieces about various artists and exhibtions of their work – recently, Cornelia Parker and Maggi Hambling; a little further back, Philip Guston and Gordon Parks. And writers: Daniel Woodrell and Dashiel Hammett, for instance; Henning Mankel. Sometimes I’ll look back at my own writing and consider how a particular novel or story came about; hold up for examination passages I think particularly interesting or successful. Ot which failed.
More personally, I’ve written about my parents’ early married lives; my children; my first experiences as an inexperienced and unqualified teacher in a tough London secondary modern.
There are poems and photographs – some mine, others taken by my daughter, Molly – and, of course, there are lists. Everyone, nowadays, seems to love a list. Mine range from The 50 Best Novels of the Century and The Best Crime Novels of All Time to The Last Ten Films I Saw and A Baker’s Dozen of Songs that surfaced on an iPad Shuffle.
Something for everyone!
Visit the blog here.