I'm reading the Whitbread/Costa winners in order - Paul Theroux's 'Picture Palace' features a very interesting main character, a famous female photographer who reluctantly agrees a retrospective exhibition that gives her an opportunity to look back on her life career and family!

I read Fiona Jones' 'Hello! Hello! Hello!' in clarkesworld March 2024 issue, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's online here : clarkesworldmagazine.com/jones_03_24/ and well worth a read if you're into SF.

Here's the pump clip for my latest beer, currently at the beer festival on Mersea Island and shortly at a local pub. No bottles or cans though.

Latest in my chronological reading of Whitbread/Costa Award winners was Beryl Bainbridge's 'Injury Time' which I really enjoyed. I'd not paid much attention to the cover so the ante being upped 3/4 of the way through was a bit of a surprised. Some great characters in it.

TBH if I spotted an orca in the sea that I was swimming in, I'd unleash a poop tornado...

Well, I got to watch 'Poor Things' last night at home : what a film! Three outstanding acting performances, and the visuals!! I'm only disappointed I didn't get to see it on the big screen. I'll be reading the source novel soon in my Whitbread/Costa Award Winners project.

Loving the Grim Art posts, I've not lived in the north for 40 years and have only the likes of Charles Debenham in #colchester for similar stuff. This one just round the corner from me, but Spar and Ladbrokes now combined into one characterless convenience store

I did neglect to mention that with my Whitbread/Costa reading, I did thoroughly enjoy William McIlvanney's 'Docherty' about a coal mining family in Scotland in the early 1900s.

Just read and enjoyed Karl Schroeder 'The Price of Attention' in The Best Science Fiction of the Year Vol 7 edited by Neil Clarke (you know, him off of clarkesworld ) and it's a good read, and, as you would expect from a 'Foresight Consultant', he handles some tech stuff well.

I'm working my way through the Whitbread/Costa Award winners, and I've just finished the 1976 winner, William Trevor's 'The Children of Dynmouth' which was a great read, and more than a tad unsettling.

.PunkAndNewWave Here's a traffic announcement made by John Peel in 1988 that is guaranteed to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up..

And I'm off shortly to the East Anglian Railway Museum to deliver a cask of a stronger, darker version of my mosaic single hop IPA.

Currently I'm reading Kate Atkinson's 'Emotionally Weird' (I'm working through her chronologically). Slow start and a bit too much time in uni seminars, but getting into proto-Jackson Brodie territory and v.g.