Ever heard this one? Question: What’s the difference between a poet and a pizza? Answer: You can feed a family of four on a pizza. Not true for the winner of The Arvon Poetry Prize this evening. Unless the pizza costs £5,000. Read more [...]

I get between three and five hours of sleep at night. This is not because I am an alien but because I have sleep apnea. Last week the hospital wired me up for a night to check heart rate breathing patterns pulse throat. I looked like someone out of a science fiction novel. Ming the mongy man. Read more [...]

Damn my head hurts. I’ve got a thumping hang over. A herd of rabbits are running on sheets of steel inside my head. Spoke to Francis at Canongate books today who have just bought a new Charles Bukowski manuscript. Yes. You heard it here first. A new Charles Bukowski script will be published by Canongate Books! Read more [...]

I can’t remember who came up with the line but I came across it on tour with Henry Normal and Johnny Bramwell. Henry is the brains behind Steve Coogan, the comedian and executive producer of Babycow productions and Johnny Bramwell is the lead singer of I am Kloot. Read more [...]

Today, Saturday, while writing I received this email. I have taken out the identifying details. Read more [...]

There's nothing to sharpen the morning senses like a car crash. I wake get ready and leave the apartment and then call into the town hall to get an I love Hackney badge, cause I do. As I am walking towards the town hall I hears a blood curdling screech.. Read more [...]

I think there was a rasta at Apple HQ and a colleague of his lost Apples latest prototype The POD. Only two were in existance at that point. But the designer lost one and was panicking. . He goes to his rasta colleague who is building the next supercomputer "Hey Ibrahim, you sure your Pod is not my Pod" and this is when Ibrahim the hardware designer coined the term. He'd been here before - things go missing people look at the guy with the ddreadlocks right. But he's cool "nahh man this is I pod". And so the phrase IPOD was born. Read more [...]

Here’s a hotel tip. Never settle for the first room that you are offered. Never be impolite at hotels. Simply look at your room and then go back to reception and ask if it is possible that you can see another room. You’ll be surprised about what you learn. I have an aversion to the hotel room that faces either another hotel room or a wall. I need light. Hotels are giant cash machines and you are the cash. Though I don’t pay for my hotel rooms I’ll be damned if I’ll be squeezed into a shoebox room so small that when I open the mini bar I fall out the window. Read more [...]

We are in the studio. I am amongst actors and it’s all good. Love being around actors and artists. David who is playing the Rabbi talks in the green room about Woody Allen whom he met recently while acting in his latest film. This story followed Adjoah Andoh who was with Maya Angelou recording With Great Pleasure at The Late Paris Studios on regent st. Now there’s a conversation right there. And next they were going to be reading my piece on the radio THE QUEENS SPEECH by Lemn Sissay. Not many times you get to hear that on the BBC in your lifetime. Read more [...]

And it is written and it is so freakin emotional. And now Eoian is getting the actors together. I have pitched two actors – Adjoah Andoh as The Queen and Carla Henry as the child in care. And both can do it! In minutes Eoian is onto their agents and booked them both, plus two other actors – David Horovitz playing the rabbi and Anjali playing the muslim woman. Read more [...]