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Chinese Star Sign:
The Pig, which
unlike the West, which would make me fat, lazy and stupid - in China
makes me hard working, loyal and diligent
Current
Favourite Possession: apart from my new mp3 player, I
have fallen back in love with my fountain pen. Reminds me of
school days, wooden desks and satchels
Most
irritating accident: leaking marker pen in my new jeans
pocket. If you have a solution to large patches of ink on
jeans, other than buying a new pair then please let me know
Favourite
condiment:
Heinz Tomato Ketchup
(I blame it on the Bahamas and rampant US cultural
conditioning)
Best Film I
don't think you will have seen:
Atanarjurat. Won a
stack of awards and by some freak of nature failed to win Best
Foreign Language film
Film
you should never watch:
Flightplan with
Boromir
and Jodie Foster.
When I read the cover I couldn't quite see how they could spin a
story out about a woman losing a kid on a plane for more than ten
minutes and they couldn't. Appalling. No really - DON'T
watch/buy/rent it. You have been warned
Children's current favourite bedtime book:
No books, actually. My son is too cool for books and is into
stories, which, as a writer, I find I am surprisingly bad at
telling. My dull and repetitive tales about Michael Joseph
Patrick O'Halleran O'Hooliheh and his cows, sheep, dogs, ducks and
tractor will never make it into print
On the bedside table:
My wife has given into the inevitable and is reading The Da Vinci
Code. Me?
King Hereafter. And some Skaldic Poetry I downloaded from
the internet, to help me sleep at night. And I have my first
Guy Gavriel Kay lined up, after years of friends recommending
him
Quote of the
Week: 'Every writer has another country' - Martin Amis
My second country is obviously
China, but then I start thinking which is my first. Not really
England, I decide, as other parts of England - such as Shropshire or
Devon - have always seemed like
foreign places. Visiting London or Durham or Bristol was an
apprenticeship for arriving in Beijing or Dar-es-Salaam. My
family, like I imagine many Yorkshire families (and Texan families -
but interestingly not Suffolk or Norfolk or Connecticut families)
cheered whenever we passed the motorway sign that said we had
returned to Yorkshire. But then when I think of the sign
which says 'South Yorkshire' I still feel I am entering a place
where the people are unlike me
Yorkshire is a big
place (for England) and I would hate to think of living in the West
or East Ridings. In fact large parts of the
North Riding is strange (Northallerton, Ripon, Richmond) so when I break it all down I end up with
a small triangle with York at the bottom, stretching up to
Catterick
and
Whitby. My home country is this triangle, which rises from
the flat land of the Vale of York into the Hambleton Hills and then
the Yorkshire Moors. It is bordered on the west with the Ouse,
on the right with the line of the A64 to Malton. At its heart
are small market towns like Helmsley and Thirsk; pubs like
The Star Inn,
at Harome; the ruins of castles like
Sheriff Hutton,
and abbeys like
Rievaulx and
Byland. Where villages here have the familiar and
unstrange names of Coxwold, Oswaldkirk, Shipton and
Sutton-on-the-Forest
And the Noble City of
York,
which there is a church for each week of the year, a pub for each
day, where streets are called gates and the gates are called
bars
Interesting Web-sites: Multimedia
Literature
This month I have been browsing through some
on-line lectures and talks. These are the most interesting
ones I came across
Featured site:
http:
www.pbase.com/jamato8
- I met John Amato, a
professional photgrapher, in Changsha last week. Interesting
guy with some great shots of China and Nepal and Tibet
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