I had few expectations when I arrived at Bristol’s Central Library—the area all but emptied of students slap-bang in the middle of the Easter break—for a talk that had been sold to me as being about ‘digital platforms for writing’. I walked in half-anticipating another sermon on how I might become the next Caitlin Moran/ [...]

May 17th, 2013 Read more

If there is one period of the modern era which inspires more daydreaming than the 1920s, then it is surely the 1890s.  Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris hit on this when it made the wormwood-riddled days of Toulouse Lautrec the obvious nostalgic destination for a 1920s jazz baby, and last night Matthew Bourne fought against [...]

May 9th, 2013 Read more

Market at the Moon is held on the first Saturday of every month at the Full Moon pub in Stokes Croft.  Born in April 2012, the market is both home to and seeks to build awareness of the talent and small trades of Bristol. Current favourites of market manager Rosie McLay include Tusk and Claw, [...]

May 8th, 2013 Read more

The winter is drawing to a close: there are rain and crocuses in place of snow and bare branches. Spring is coming, and none too soon, because I have now run out of underground (i.e, hidden from the elements) places to visit in Brno. The situation was so extreme I even fled abroad (I took [...]

May 8th, 2013 Read more

The naked body. As children we are introduced to it with the plastic shapes of a blonde Barbie or Action-Man figure.  As teenagers we are re-introduced to it with the hairless forms of thrusting porn stars, or those alienly beautiful men and women who live within the four-wall fantasy of a magazine cover. Images of [...]

May 7th, 2013 Read more

My first encounter with the Egyptians was in Primary school when I sat in the glass-topped part of the library and smiled smugly at the idea of civilizations with glamorous queens as their leaders.  I carefully copied hieroglyphs with a sharp pencil and decided the world would be so much better if we all wrote [...]

May 7th, 2013 Read more

  I tried to be brave as uncomfortably hot wax was daubed on my back. They told me what would follow wouldn’t hurt. They lied. About halfway through I asked for a compassionate break. I hadn’t much thought of what I’d do during the temporary cessation of hostilities, although a quiet sob might have made [...]

May 5th, 2013 Read more

On what now seems like a date so very far in the past, the 26th March, I attended an event run by Hecate Theatre Company at the lovely Birdcage café and bar in Bristol.  I deliberately left off writing about it because I left feeling unsure of my own reaction and imagined a little time [...]

April 8th, 2013 Read more

 ‘I’m from a long line of trouble makers’ says Inua Ellams with a smile. Hmm we think, eyeing the red stain on his white shirt and shaking our middle class heads. A black man with a blood stain. We’ve seen this before.   The 14th Tale is a semi-autobiographical, one-man coming of age story. It [...]

April 4th, 2013 Read more

Rosemary Wagg and Lucian Waugh boil the kettle get down to hard core politics: should a ballet be seen in a cinema? Lucian Waugh: Exactly halfway through Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man, Cynthia Leach, tiresome New York aristocrat who somehow ends up in a Californian college dining hall, calls across the cafeteria. Her [...]

April 3rd, 2013 Read more