We Interrupt this Intermission

… to announce to any London-based readers that I’ll be appearing at the Inside Out Festival on Monday 25th October at Birkbeck. There’ll be readings and discussion from a panel of talented writers* so it will be well worth five of your English pounds. If you’ve a book of mine you want signed (and if you haven’t, why not?) that would be the perfect opportunity to do it.

Be there or be elsewhere, obviously.

*and me

Home, James

‘So much for their unerring homing instinct,’ I said as we stood at the falls, watching the salmon leaping. Most of the fish were doing the textbook thing of heading up the waterfall for their home tributary, but there was one that either hadn’t read the textbook or had mis-programmed its GPS and was repeatedly leaping out of the water in the wrong direction and beating its head against the cliff wall instead. I wonder whether if you stood at the right spot and caught one, it would count as poaching? ‘It just jumped into my hands, officer…’

Anyway, hopefully my own homing instincts (although not to my natal spawning grounds) will be somewhat better as on Monday we’re off to Huttonian‘s and on Tuesday I shall be here as part of my two nations (well, Scotland and England) in one day whirlwind book tour.

And Points North

So we’re off for a few days, to Edinburgh via Orkney (I knew we should never have trusted that sat nav). We’re going to Edinburgh, of course, because of this, which I know is in all of your diaries.  Pehaps with the scribbled reminder ‘avoid at all costs…‘

Posting may be patchy until I return. And who knows, photos may follow.

Because it Turns Out…

… there is some culture up here after all. Word Power’s Edinburgh Book Fringe, to be precise. Where, if you squint carefully, you will notice this. I will be appearing alongside Thomas Legendre who will be reading from his novel, The Burning, a thriller set in the rarefied world of academic economists. Sounds unlikely – but then you never thought you’d read a thriller all about birdwatching, either, did you?

Anyway, be there or be, er, somewhere else, obviously.

Good News for Cheapskates

I interrupt this everyday tale of country folk for a brief commercial announcement. For those of you who have not yet bought it, (and why not?) this book will now be available every night on the steam radio as this week and next week’s book at bedtime. Not only that, but it will also shortly be available as a paperback. And those of you who live where the sun does shine have no excuse, because it will be on listen again.

Please pay attention. There will be a quiz at the end

Thank you. And now back to Ambridge, where Ruth is burying Shula under the patio…*

*I can dream.