Finished watching Leonard and Hungry Paul, which was a charming and wonky delight. Good things happening to decent people is a much underrated genre of entertainment, I reckon.

UNBOUND AUTHORS: Leftover copies of your books in the UK (MacMillan) warehouse will be pulped within the next week or two. DM me for a link to the warehouse stock list and contacts. If you have no dosh, another publisher (Wilton Sq) is willing to buy the books & distribute on a 50/50 profit split

Sometimes I think it’s going to be the librarians who will save us all.

Today I learned that Nigel Farage is indeed a racist, but he's a polite and friendly racist. So that's okay, then.

My birthday present to myself was the Blaster Curtis from We Are Rewind. It is, I must admit, somewhat larger than I imagined. Currently playing Sandhills Music by Ben Seretan. On cassette, obviously.

If you are doing any shopping online this festive season, it's really worth signing up to Top Cashback. They basically grab affiliate fees on your behalf and pass them on to you. Don't have to use my referral code, but it gives you a £10 sign-up bonus if you do. www.topcashback.co.uk/ref/wildsheep

Reposting for those of you who may have just woken up from an excellent sleep.

One Minute Park. Rolling video footage of a different park every sixty seconds.

I would welcome your recommendations for a great mattress please. Lots of brands out there to choose from and every article testing them seems to have different results. If you've had a good experience, please share. Full disclosure: I do like mine on the firm side, matron.

Well, this could be an interesting evening.

The Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff, Dallas. Today they’re showing the same double bill they showed on 22-11-63, when Oswald was arrested here

It's been a bit quiet lately when it should be picking up for Christmas. If you're shopping for gifts, have a look at what I do. Everything I make is designed here in Manchester and manufactured in the UK. www.gailmyerscough.co.uk

I am very much here for this Babehoven and Squirrel Flower collaboration.

I've put together a song bundle fundraiser for Sudan & Palestine with money going to Doctors Without Borders, The Sameer Project, & The Gaza Project. Pay as much or as little (0$ if you like, we'd just ask you to share the link) as you can afford for 21 tracks from artists around the world.

Spoiler: This is not even remotely an issue. Never was. I have personally complained more about bad lighting in posh restaurant loos in the past year than the total of complaints about trans women using public toilets in the same period.

So, apparently, an author whose manuscript I edited earlier this year has just won a Portuguese literary award for unpublished novels. I cannot understand a word of the announcement, and I am still trying to work out if he had two versions, one English and one Portuguese, but great news nonetheless.

I can confirm that I have just eaten the final slice of my birthday cake from last weekend, which means you may now all start preparing for, or celebrating, Christmas. Any such activities before this date are null and void.

FYI UK cricket fans, the Ashes are available to watch for free on Channel 7 in Australia via their 7plus streaming service. You just need to log with a VPN.

looking at a poetry anthology from 1947 at the British Library, obscure enough that I had to ask them to cut some of the pages (!) here’s a poem by Oswell Blakeston and Max Chapman, artists and writers who were pretty much a lifelong couple

A fascinating and disappointing article here. As someone who did reissue a Gertrude Trevelyan novel, I can confirm it sold pretty well. It was never going to sell millions, but it's done nicely, thank you very much. We also had inquiries from international publishers wanting translation rights.

I read the Aotearoa New Zealand publication of this last year, and it's great fun. Gay uncles and their niece investigate crimes inspired by Nancy Drew. I'm delighted it's got a UK publisher because it was pretty tricky to get hold of over here until now.

Announcing our 2026 bursary for small presses and crowdfunder AND book that Heather and I have secretly been writing about @404ink.bsky.social over the last few months. Our way of saying farewell! www.404ink.com/blog/publish...

This has been the one award in my publishing career that's recognised more of the authors I've worked with than any other, and it's wonderful to see Damien Wilkins and Tina Makereti on the list this year. I had nothing to do with their current books, but proud to have published them in the past.

I would welcome your recommendations please for the best memberships to have in London. I am now, or have been in the past, a member of the London Library, BFI, Garden Cinema, V&A, Barbican, and the Southbank Centre, so I know about those, but would love to hear your suggestions for others. Ta!

Performative cruelty now seems to be government policy. Fuck them. Fuck the lot of them.

A Language of Limbs is a remarkable piece of work. Beautiful, poetic, visceral, devastating but with flashes of joy. Parallel narratives chart the lives of two queer Australian women from the early 1970s for close to three decades. Their stories start similarly but flow in different directions...

I did watch this over the weekend. They really could not make it today. Very silly but plenty of fun. Entirely obvious what was going to happen after the opening five minutes, and all the better for it.

A Language of Limbs is a remarkable piece of work. Beautiful, poetic, visceral, devastating but with flashes of joy. Parallel narratives chart the lives of two queer Australian women from the early 1970s for close to three decades. Their stories start similarly but flow in different directions...

With (ahem) Christmas around the corner, may I divert your gaze to my lino prints. Lots of sea and food themed prints. I carve the lino, and it’s all hand pressed by me. Prints are A4 or A5 size, so easy to frame and gift. Thanks for supporting a small creative business 🩵 sundownerstudio.co.uk

Okay cineastes please help. I saw it at the London Film Festival maybe twenty years ago, definitely French language I think a Belgian film and I thought it was called L'autre but all my searches under every variant of this title I can think of are coming up blank. It's about a woman who becomes

Yesterday I caught a bit of an episode of Celebrity Chase. Piers Morgan was playing. Was genuinely surprised by how little general knowledge he has. It's almost as if he's not really qualified to comment on, well, anything.

One of the most striking things for me when visiting Copenhagen is that the entire Metro system is barrier-less. You use the equivalent of an Oyster card or buy a paper ticket, and you're trusted to travel like an adult. Occasional inspectors will impose fines if you are fair dodging, though.

If you're the sort of person who likes Fleetwood Mac and is up for spending three hours in a theatre watching a fictional Fleetwood Mac-like band disintegrate while spending over a year recording a Rumours-like album, then the play Stereophonic is absolutely for you. I am not that sort of person.

This is always great fun and good luck to everyone who's taking part. I just can't do it these days because I am so out of touch with contemporary publishing that I haven't heard of half of the recent books that feature, even if they've been number one bestsellers.

Tired of the same old Christmas cards? Want something a bit different? Get your #Christmas cards and wrap here www.gailmyerscough.co.uk/christmas-ca...

If you're the sort of person who likes Fleetwood Mac and is up for spending three hours in a theatre watching a fictional Fleetwood Mac-like band disintegrate while spending over a year recording a Rumours-like album, then the play Stereophonic is absolutely for you. I am not that sort of person.

Arterio trains are shit. I'm on one now having a shitty time in an uncomfortable seat with no flip-down table to put my drink. I hope the people who designed them, and the South Western Railway suits that bought them, are having a shit time too. Wankers.

This is an interesting article about some smaller music streaming services that perhaps aren't going to rival Spotify but could be an alternative or supplement. I'm giving Cantilever a go. It would be helpful if I was able to cast to a speaker, but apart from that, so far, so good.

Two neighbours now have Christmas trees up. They're free to do whatever they want, I couldn't give a shit, but I do wonder how they can keep the festive momentum going for so long. Surely by the time it gets to Christmas Day, the decorations have become the norm rather than something special?

Today marks 50 years since one of the most controversial events in Australian political history. Essentially, the Queen's representative in Australia, the Governor-General, sacked the incumbent Prime Minister and installed the Leader of the Opposition in his place.

Just catching up on last night's episode of Mastermind, for which I wrote the specialist subject questions about The Works of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin. It was great to research and write questions about two of my heroes and also to sneak in a mention of another hero, Frank Muir.

Read Palestine Week is coming up on 29 November-December 5. A great way to support Palestinian writers is to read their work. Also, it's good to read it because of its quality. Why not take part and perhaps discover a talented writer you haven't read before.

Love this, but upon searching online I found it is actually Clare Youngs, with an S, and she has a splendid shop. www.clareyoungs.co.uk

You know you're getting old when books you read when they were first published are now considered classics.

This is one of the best biographies of a writer that I have read. Grace Metalious was a 1950s American housewife who wrote a novel loosely based on the residents of her New Hampshire. That book was called Peyton Place and it became the best-selling American novel of all time for a while.

Thrown out of his family for a crime he didn’t commit, Gil becomes model and muse to the great Pieter Bruegel. But in Bruegel's world politics, art and religion are explosively combined and soon love and vocation are also at war. The Bruegel Boy is available now Holland House Books: buff.ly/vbnyB0Y

If you like your comedies dark then A Different Man might be your thing. I enjoyed its Kafkaesque absurdity, and the three lead performances are great, although Renate Reinsve is largely lacking from this trailer. A couple of big belly laughs from me and plenty of awkward chuckles.

A historical epic that looks like a documentary, 'Aguirre, Wrath of God' was an interesting watch, for sure, but I found it hard to engage with either the story or the characters. This trailer does a great job of extracting what little plot there is and presenting it as potentially appealing.

Yes, mate, of course the small dent in the corner of the LP you bought from me on eBay is 'a flaw I didn't disclose in the listing' rather than, I don't know, damage in transit, perhaps? I am sorry the vinyl you paid £7 for isn't entirely perfect. My thoughts are with you at this difficult time.

This is an excellent, off-kilter and often very funny collection. Highly recommended. And it's free.