This annual festival, organised by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust charity, is a labour of love by Greene enthusiasts, and this was my third visit. I wrote about last year’s here and this year I’ll also give a brief account of the festival. Note that, while I’m putting this on my blog this year (search Graham Greene in the bar on the left if you want to see my earlier posts about Greene), my Greene writing from now on will appear on Substack, where there’ll be a longer version of this post. Bonus pieces there will complement the serial novel I begin to publish in a month’s time, each post appearing a hundred years to the day after the one on which it is set, during the…

I first read Graham Greene when I was nineteen. The University of Nottingham had a full run of his novels in the library. I spent much of my first term reading them when I should have been studying dull classics of early literature for my joint honours degree. His fiction fed my suspicion that what I wanted to do with my life was write novels. It wasn’t until 1990, the year of my first novel, and the paperback publication of Volume 1 of Norman Sherry’s Life of Graham Greene when I realised the author had lived, briefly, in Nottingham. Moreover, this city, where I’ve lived for nearly fifty years, played a crucial role in Greene’s development. That’s the opening paragraph of my introduction to Greeneland,…

Back in the 80s, I read Charles Willeford’s Hoke Mosley novels as they came out in the UK. They’re bleak but brilliant crime novels written in a stark style – the nearest European equivalent might be Jean-Patrick Manchette. Back in the 80s, they felt like they belonged with the American literary writers known as ‘dirty-realists’, my favourites of whom were Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Jayne-Anne Phillips. Willeford was older and had been around longer. He could be controversial, as in the novel ‘Cockfighter’, but I hadn’t heard of his most controversial book, the original second Hoke Mosley novel, ‘Grimhaven.’ That remained the case until a week ago, when a post on Bluesky informed me of a place where I could read this book, which…

I go to gigs most weeks. Every year there tends to be a week where I have several. This week, it was five (nearly six, as I originally planned to see Nadia Reid at The Bodega on Monday). That’ll seem like overkill to some, but last year I was at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, where I would sometimes see five acts in a day, and I’m a regular at Green Man festival, where I’m likely to see even more. The week was bookended by shows from two bands whose front-men are 58, a few years younger than me: Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donohue at the Rescue Rooms and saxophonist/band leader Tony Kofi at Peggy’s Skylight. I’ve seen both many times before. Each band…

Every year from 1987 to 2022 my partner Sue and I put together a best of year cassette or CD, chronicling our favourite music from the year just ending. This year, after skipping a year because I was mourning the loss of Sue, I’ve decided to continue the tradition, but with a Spotify playlist. In 2022 it became clear that only a handful of people were still using CDs. This way saves me a lot of postage and time spent burning CDs. I’ve donated the money I’ve saved on CDs and Christmas cards I used to post to Oxfam’s Gaza appeal. My love of music helped me get through the tough months after losing my life partner and, in particular, my long delayed trip to…