Fry It Up

"Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it?"

Ace, ace, ace. Stephen Fry's new Podgram is all about Language.

"Use it, use it, if you've got it, use it. Don't be afraid of it, don't believe it belongs to anyone else. Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free, and all words - light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be - bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors."

Get it all here.

P.S. I like the way he says "books" at the start of the thirty-second minute.

Drew Gummerson's 50 Words Of Christmas

Good timer and great writer Drew Gummerson set up a competition before Christmas. He likes his 50 word stories, see, and he likes competitions as well. The rules were simple - it had to be 50 words long exactly, and be about Christmas (or at least have something Christmas-y in it.)

Well, our very own Nathan only went and won it didn't he!

You can read his story, and the eleven runners up, on Drew's blog here.

Cosy And Green

Pods Of Wisdom (by Tracey Meek & John Goncalves), originally uploaded by rjbirkin.

I went to Big Blue yesterday to pick up Tracey Meek's illustrations for our upcoming HOME book, and John Goncalves was there with her. They were injecting pea pods with wisdom to sell at this weekend's Riff Raff festival. If you see them there, you should buy one. They're lovely. I bought two.

One is called 'Mustafa', and the other (pictured) is called Clare, "a wonderful peas of misfortune wrapped up as snug as a bug in a cosy green shell called home." Very apt.

Tracey's illustrations are awesome. Go here to see some on your computer screen, and come down to Big Blue in Derby on Saturday 20th September to see them in frames on the walls, and buy a book with some of them in.

Milling Around

On Monday of this week we went up to Matlock to be shown how to Advise young people doing their Arts Award. Arts Awards weren't around when I was a young person. A Silver Arts Award is worth a high-grade pass at GCSE level, and a Gold one is the same as an A-Level! Just think, I could have got an A-level in doing cool stuff instead of spending all my spare time learning to do stuff by trial and error and neglecting my A-levels...

Ho-hum. It was a nice day and, like most things we do, felt like we'd travelled in time. We were in a conference room in Masson Mill at Matlock Bath. This was in the car-park:


We went up there with Michael Frearson, who we're doing some activities with at a summer school in August. We're indulging young people's imaginations in Time Travel and Super-Hero stories, poems, and songs, and we might even get them to publish a book/cd by the end of the fortnight. Simon Jones (Jonezy/Equalibri) was there, as he's doing some things along the same lines soon. We may or may not be a part of that, depending on time and work, but I sincerely hope that we do.

We're hoping to do more of this kind of stuff as time goes on, and getting the Arts Award Advisor certificates is the first step. If you're under 25 or if you're the parent/guardian of someone who is, keep your eyes and ears peeled for news of practitioners in your area, or go to the website.

That is all.

TTO x

Small Publishing Archive, and The Place Where Time Stood Still

Cromford is where time has almost stood still. It's also where you'll find RGAP (Research Group for Artists Publications), behind a car repair garage, in an old mill that doesn't work anymore.


I went up there to have a chat with Martin Rogers about the way we publish our books, and if we could use their space or equipment. It turns out they're so utterly full of books that there's less space there than in our house at the moment. Martin have us some great advice on how to speed up the process of making our books this time around, and lent us a couple of bone folders. What a Lord!





These are ADANA presses. I love them. I want to use them As Soon As Possible. We might make something up just as an excuse to use these babies.







This is on the side of the building. It's where all that machinery from the picture at the top is supposed to go. At the moment it looks like someone is flushing a toilet all the time. A really really big one.




It's amazingly beautiful up there. Unfortunately, the place isn't open all the time. You have to get in touch. But we urge you to, because Martin is lovely and a great help to anyone with a passion for publishing. He also runs the Small Publishers Fair in London in October. I think we might be going to perform and flog our wares.

It's About Time

We had a great meeting last night. The first in ages what with redundancies and holidays and it being Too Nice To Be Inside.

The new book is coming together nicely. We should be ready to go to print by the end of this week, which means that (fingers crossed) we'll be binding even before the Hegley gig.

We also finalised the running order of the TIME launch night, making sure that the only thing that will be the same will be the dynamics and energy. We're not going to give away too much until we've had a chance to get everything together, but Big Blue might very well feel like you're Outside Of Time. We hope anyway. Just to clarify it will still be free, and there'll be music and coffee and booze and free stuff.

It's easy giving away Bourbon biscuits when you're releasing a book about Coffee, but what do you give away when you're releasing a book about Time?

We also made a bit of time to prepare some original stuff for the John Hegley gig. I'm not sure how, but we ended up having a fictional argument in Haiku. Then again that might be a good thing to do...

A Cold Wind Blows

It's sunny, but it's gone a bit cold again. I made a mistake yesterday wearing shorts and a short sleeve shirt to walk to Baby Studios with my guitar. I was going there to meet Michael Frearson, and to put some guitar underneath his spoken word. Here's Fierce:


I was hoping to put a link up to the things we recorded, but late last night the man tells me he'd fluffed up a line in the one song that we'd done together before (at the Coffee launch night). All the other ones we put together with him in the vocal booth and me sat strumming something, but it worked really well. Alex Blood was at the helm. This is him:


I don't know about you, but I like his hat. I'll post up some links when the stuff gets fixed. Anyway, we're hoping to host some of Michael's poetry and prose here pretty damn soon.

I've just had a listen to the first QUAD Podcast (QUADCAST!), and I liked what the guys at Katapult were saying about Derby. If you like culture and you like Derby, have a listen.

Update: You can listen to the Michael Frearson recordings HERE. Go, go now!