As I sat in Wellington Airport, waiting for my flight - the first of three long flights home - a small earthquake occurred. The terminal building shivered for about 30 seconds. I looked around me. People continued chatting and checking...
Tuner? Check. Spare strings? Check. Knockout pill for the flight? Check. It's the final countdown before my first tour of New Zealand. I'll be playing, and doing workshops, at the Wellington Folk Festival, and then travelling the North Island (with one...
One of the pleasures of watching a CD go out into the world is seeing which songs, if any, are noticed enough to strike a tiny, distant note in the prevailing noise of the world. Of the songs on Enough About...
Occasionally when I look at my dog Ruby, I remember a conversation I had in about 2005 with my friend, neighbour and fellow-author Roger Deakin. I told Roger that, after years of living with cats, I was thinking of getting...
To be any good, a song or story has to come from a personal place. It is, however well-disguised, a report from the tiny, little-known country of Me. That makes being reviewed an odd process. It's not just the work...
When I first started writing songs, about ten years ago, I took them around to folk clubs. One, I discovered too late, took a hard-line, faintly Stalinist, approach to any music that did not belong to what is reverently described...
When I'm feeling disheartened by the fiction I've been reading (it happens), I reach for something by Philip Roth. He never lets me down. It's not that his books are all masterpieces of the order of Sabbath's Theater or The...
It was when the Independent lost its best columnist Christina Patterson that I knew I no longer felt at home at the paper. By 'lost', I mean 'fired'. Christina had been there for ten years and at the time was...
The question was where to play Will Self. He would be a dominant presence in central defence, of course, but what we needed was a goal-scorer. As player-manager, I saw him in the role of the traditional centre-forward - a...
Like many placid, slightly dull people, I have often been secretly jealous of those whose dramatic car-crash lives is the subject of endless concern and interest among their friends. It has taken until now for me to come out of...