I arrived at La Muse writers and artists retreat at midnight last night, so this could still be counted as day one. My journey took rather longer than expected, do to trains being stuck in tunnels between Spain and France, and then more trains not arriving, leaving me sitting for 3 hours on the floor of Narbonne Station, watching the last episode of Mad Men season two on my laptop!

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My only television interview is for a local access digital cable channel in a shed in Shropshire. A young balding man greets me at the door and shows me to the green room which is just a cupboard with a portable TV showing dreadful documentaries about the local community. I make a cup of tea and then the same man leads me to the studio which is another tiny room with one fixed camcorder on an Argos tripod pointing at two plastic chairs in front of a green screen.

The screen makes me nervous because they are able to project anything that takes their fancy after the fact. On my Media Production course at Bournemouth University I once floated TWAT above the head of a fellow student who I actually quite liked, so I know what people are capable of...

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Woke up with a very painful shoulder today – I can barely raise my arm to chin level, so poor Lord H had to help me get dressed. It’s not the shoulder that was numb either – it’s the other one, so obviously I am having deep trouble up top at the moment. As it were. It feels like I’ve somehow pulled a muscle so I have taken a double dose of Nurofen Plus and put some Deep Heat cream on it and am hoping for easier days … I’m wondering – though I admit it sounds strange – if it’s because over the last couple of weeks or so I’ve been piling up the pillows when I sleep to try to ease the breathing problems. Lordy, but I sound as if I’m barely clinging to life here on the dark side. I’m lucky to be still around at all, you know! Anyway, I removed one of the pillows last night and am waiting for the healing to begin, ho ho ...


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I'd like to draw your attention to this, it's a new blog by writer Adorna Shine, and it's cool. You can read my review of her book here.

Even cooler, is this - Jenn Ashworth's A Kind of Intimacy available for pre-order with a cover and everything.

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So, a quick round-up for now, and I'll sort out something coherent as soon as my brain's cleared of jet-lag, and jet-virus, and jet-landing (as in coming down to earth to laundry, tax bills, empty fridge, Christmas catalogues and so on, after ten days of being dined, wined, conversed with, taxied and bag-carried...)

WIN A SIGNED COPY OF A SECRET ALCHEMY: silly competition coming very soon, so watch this side-bar...

EVENTS: if you feel like dropping by for a listen, do come and say hello. And if after that you feel like buying a copy of A Secret Alchemy or The Mathematics of Love or even both, I'll be happy to deface it/them with a signature and a dedication to whichever aunt on your Christmas list will leave you out of her will if you don't come up with something other than bath salts this year.

Wednesday 19th November at 7.30pm: I'm reading from A Secret Alchemy at one of my favourite indie bookshops, Review, in Bellenden Road, Peckham. This is part of the Peckham Literary Festival, and there'll be drinks, nibbles, and the general atmosphere of off-beat literariness which South East London's hallmark.

Wednesday 26th November at 5pm: I'll be reading at Goldsmiths College. Goldsmiths, in a very real sense, is the birthplace of A Secret Alchemy. Drinks and nibbles, and if you're thinking of doing an MA or even a PhD in Creative Writing, either there or elsewhere, it's a chance to get the low-down from staff and students, as there should be a good few of both present.

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Have spent most of the day being wonderfully lazy, hurrah! Well, I felt I deserved it after yesterday's excitements. And I probably also needed to recover from yet another disturbing dream last night - actually more of a nightmare I think. Bizarrely I and another girl (though I somehow managed to be the consciousness of both) were on a journey, but our fellow-travellers were being kidnapped by strange women dressed in black with machine guns. The girl and I were desperate to avoid this fate, but were unfortunately captured anyhow. Not entirely sure what happened to the girl, but the nasty women operated on me by removing a kidney and inserting a container full of purple liquid instead - as they wanted me to carry it over the border for them, thus avoiding the border-guards. Ye gods, what the hell is all this about??? I woke up in a right state in the middle of the night, and poor Lord H took a while to calm me down. Anyway this morning, I have no unusual scars so it looks like (a) I haven't been operated on by aliens, and (b) I still have both my kidneys. Thank the Lord for that then ...


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Who was it who said that poetry was emotion recollected in tranquillity? It's not just emotion, though, is it? Nor is it simply a process of recollection. (Tranquillity usually helps, though I'm typing this while eavesdropping on, among others, a full-on Yiddish conversation, complete with assimilated American vocabulary...) The thing about experience, as every writing teacher has to explain, gently or forcefully, according to (you hope) the temperament of the beginner writer, or (more likely) the temperament of themselves, is that it isn't enough. What makes experience craft or even art is the business of putting it through the sieves of memory, of experience before and experience after, the pitch and rhythm of words, their images and associations.

So, though I've got nothing much better to do at Newark NJ airport for the next hour or so, I can't turn in some nice philosophical point about the last ten days, nor a funny or heartfelt story. At the moment the best I can do is this:

aeroplanes: 6

non-duty books read: 5

pages of random notebook notes: 10

delectable, brilliantly painted little animals bought: 4

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Some strange dreams last night - all of them (as Lord H kindly pointed out) having to do with the letter D. First of all I was stuck in a cave or potholing (something I'd never do in real life, I assure you!), having some kind of adventure. There was a big explosion and I was trapped underground and ... well ... died. I then fastforwarded to my funeral, where Lord H was obviously rather devastated. I didn't like that idea at all, so (in my dream) I decided to dream it again, and this time I managed to survive the explosion, and solve the mystery, and everyone was happy, hurrah. In the second dream, Lord H and I were planning to get a dog (we're not too keen on dogs, so I can't work that one out at all), and asked some friends what to do about getting it through Fireworks Night. One friend said that the best thing to do was close all the windows and doors, turn the TV on really loud and stare into the dog's eyes whilst swaying. This would make it think it was a robot and it then wouldn't be afraid of loud noises. Hmm, so that's clear then. What can it all mean???


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It was written all over the house. In the kitchen, underneath the mirror and to the left of the etching of the cockerel was the word outspoken. It was written in pencil as were the words I love you scrawled under the skillet above the stove. We found two pieces of wood in the back room with the word mine scrawled on them and in the living room above the fire, someone had gouged [more ...]

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A very short story, called, Give Me Strength


Give Me Strength by Nik Perring.m4a




(You might have to right click or open it in iTunes. It is there, I promise. It's taken me 2 hours so it bloomin' well should be.)


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