I walk into the artists section of the dining tent and introduce myself to John Bird. Within the first two minutes of meeting Mr Bird he says “I used to be a racist. Now I have a pubjabi wife and support Obama”.    more »

“Mummy mummy Granny’s Cafe” an excited child says to her mother as they speed past “look look Granny’s Cafe”. There’s an innocently irritated expression on her mothers untidying face.This is a literary festival she scowls. “It’s the granary cafe” she says “GRA-NA-RY”.   more »

The train is now passing through town of Honeybourne and thankfully the onslaught of rain has stopped. Above my desk at The Southbank centre it reads “It ain’t where you go, It’s where your at”. The line comes from a song I wrote abut seven years ago. After all any seemingly big move has never been to find a better place outside oneself but to satisfy the place within.   more »

“What a good looking young boy” says the hotel owner Mr Gwynne as Mrs Gwynne busies herself past him and back into the kitchen for the keys to my room. They’re cheery enough. They could be two friendly voles in toad of toad hall. This small bed and breakfast Belmont House, is warm and friendly and perfectly situated in the centre of Hay. I am here for the Hay on Wye Literature festival, the most famous literary festival in the United Kingdom tucked gently but confidently into the collar bone of The Black Hills of Wales.   more »

The festival bus takes ten minutes and arrives at a field with gigantic white tents. It’s like a quidditch world cup final. The Sky TV banners flap high in the sky. A mini white city of canvas concert halls has been erected with a warren of walkways that lead to a bewildering program of events. The sound of applause spills out into from somewhere: where (?) nobody knows. This festival is gorgeous. I enter the green room a place where artists settle, drink, chat.   more »

Of my own free will I joined Face book. The free will went a bit like this: One minute I was fixing up some dinner and then I heard a bleep from the computer screen in the office and then I heard myself saying “Must. Join. Computer. Facebook. Must. Join. Computer. Facebook.” And it was as natural as that.   more »

There's five minutes until the day begins. It's nearly midnight. I open the kitchen door and.....   more »

I am searching for flowers. I am getting more and more tense as I reclose each door. What does it matter anyway I tell myself. You can't miss what you didn't have. I've been telling myself that one all my life. It's just that today is the day that I do miss what I didn't have. I'll allow myself that.   more »

So there we were writers the three of us, fed up. By fed up I mean, we had just eaten! A cab was hailed, Gwenyth went to her hotel in Kings Cross while the journalist and I continued. Home draws closer under a full, full moon. The best performance of the evening goes to The Full Moon.   more »

“If as Marx said ‘Religion is the opiate of the people’ then surely nationalism is the crack cocaine” – Gaim Kibreab Birkbeck College.   more »

I first met Tenzin in South Africa where he read his poems on stage at The Poetry Africa Festival in Durban. He was campaigning for Tibet - by walking - long before it gained the worlds attention. He has walked around the world to raise its consciousness of Tibet. Amazingly this has happened/is happening. This is his latest post   more »

In the evening I travelled to Hammersmith and the home of George Devine, the founder of the rebirth of The Royal Court Theatre. His home has a blue plaque on the wall and looks out upon the Thames. Five of us, the judging panel for The George Devine Award finally whittled down the scripts to one clear winner. The prize is £10,000, ($20,000) - it's alot of money   more »

Spoke to a mother and wished her happy Mothers Day. It was Mothers Day yesterday in America, where she lives. So I called a day late, but still I called. It’s the first time in my adult life that I’ve wished a mother Happy Mothers Day.   more »

Last night I joked “I used to be angry, now I’m a rebel with a mortgage, and a nice deli round the corner – with great humus”. The humus was here and the bread and the salad and the sun and the cricket and The Journalist and the newspapers and me. I should be reading the scripts for the Royal Court. But not today. Not today. About the anger. I am no less angry than I was before, I am just more defined about where my anger should be directed - so too with love   more »

The back stage is full to bursting with people, except the poets. Paddy O'Connell the MC arrives. The audience goes quiet. The Saturday Live Theme tune plays. And the poets begin. There is a lot of hilarity in the reading and the poets are skilled and slick. They are rehearsed and refined, they are witty and full of wonder. The lighting is perfect. Paddy is wonderful and the joint is jumping. It’s a reading that I want to watch but under the circumstances I have to take part. I have an absolute feeling of not wanting to go on stage. It is less and less enticing as the evening unravels. The poets are everything that I knew they would be, which is a shame.   more »

I have never been jealous of anyone. Irritated, most definitely, but hardly envious. That the exploration of ambition is fuelled by envy is strange to me. Ambition is a wonderful thing: I don’t see why it should ever be coupled with bullying or autocratic behaviour. What I do see are ambitious people who lack the emotional resources to further their ambition and this leads them to employ there frustration as a weapon to metre out on others as they bludgeon their way forward with a trained smile.    more »

Unfortunately we at The South Bank were thrown into a situation of damage limitation and needs must. I was determined that the replacement for wonderful Fi must be someone of equal quality. For a moment I thought it was all going to become ridiculously and unneccasserily adversarial between the BBC and The South Bank, two organisations that I have the utmost respect for.   more »

The Prime Minister John Major will never know how close he came to death. I realised the man driving me to the airport was not just any driver – in fact, he wasn’t a driver at all and that it was no accident that in the forty minutes that I had been in the car I had heard so much.   more »

I was leaving the country and couldn’t practically deal with this. Rachel at the south bank immediately took up the reigns and reared up her horse and galloped onwards. Martin Colthorpe head of programming ran alongside and dived on the back. Within hours of getting the news in England as my plane skidded off the tarmac at Gatwick Paddy had said yes! We had sorted it. Go team!   more »

The evening fades and I sleep beneath the oak tree and dream of green skies and branches growing from my eyes. There's a knock at the door. There's a knock at the door. Someone is knocking on the bedroom door!!! .    more »

I’ve slipped into the soho soup of literary agencies and though I am neither waving nor drowning, I am sort of treading soup. I’ve got offers for my memoir from major publishing houses and so much more. I need to scoop myself out of the Soho soup and get some perspective. I must go now, I haven’t googled myself for at least ten minutes.   more »

At Monkey Forest the Barbary Macaques roam freely in a 60-acre forest boasts the leaflet. A man said to me once that their may come a time not too far away when Britian fully realises itself as one giant theme park. He’s not wrong in stoke and staffordshire   more »

Our birthdays are entanglements. Each year the date hurtles towards us like a rock falling to earth from the weakening orbit of past . Some years it hits you, brings you to your knees, and others it makes a low and deep thud as it buries into the earth. Occasionaly it crashes through the roof and lands in the garden and splits the laburnum tree in two.   more »