Sweet Nothings

Just a quick update on my new baby (not the human one) - it's now available to order in paperback from Amazon at the reasonably competitive price of £7.99. 'Why is it so much more expensive than the Kindle edition (yours for a bargain £1.99)?', I hear you cry. Well, because this is done via Amazon's new Kindle Direct Publishing paperback self-publishing facility, it costs a fair amount to print each individual copy ordered and I wanted to make at least a bit from royalties because I do have a family to feed. This paperback service is still in its beta stage too, which I fully intend to use an excuse should the format of the printed article be in any way defective. Sadly, this probably won't work as an excuse for the contents itself. In case you haven't heard (and with my legendary marketing and networking skills, how could you not have?), "Wrecking Crew" is a novel about a disparate group of people who are unfortunate enough to be passengers on...

As promised/threatened  here , my first* novel " Wrecking Crew " has just been released into the wild. Inevitably, my submissions to literary agents have not quite generated a game-changing buzz or triggered a ferocious bidding war. Still, I'd like to re-emphasize that my being forced to sail the self-publishing seas may not be because my work is entirely terrible, but could instead be due to its lack of marketability or resistance to being pigeonholed into a tried and trusted genre. I hereby invite you to be the judge. Behold the generic clipart cover! In fairness, I like words more than pictures. "Wrecking Crew" was inspired by a flight from Key West to Orlando at the beginning of November 2014, the transition between the first, relaxing phase of our honeymoon in the beautiful Florida Keys to several days of theme park-based craziness at Disney World. Because most people undertake this journey by car, and because Key West airport is adorably dinky, we...

Even in today’s state of constant managerial flux, Southampton’s recent sacking of Claude Puel seemed somewhat harsh. An 8th placed finish and a cup final appearance is surely a decent return for a club which has become football’s equivalent of a used car showroom each summer (Saido Mané and Victor Wanyama being last season’s nice little earners). And if that league position is slightly misleading – miles away from Everton in 7th, only 6 points clear of Watford in 17th – the Ben Stiller dad-alike Puel could point to further mitigating circumstances in the form of injuries to Charlie Austin and Virgil van Dijk, and Jose Fonte’s ill-judged departure in January to a club where he will very much not be playing Champions League football. In days gone by, before 24 hour rolling news and breaking TwitFace updates, we marvelled at tales of Athletico Madrid’s exotically-named chairman Jesus Gil y Gil bringing new meaning to the phrase ‘manager of the month’ as he put another hapless ap...

The story so far: Wednesday morning, April 19th. No sooner had our heroine Charlotte been born than she was separated from her parents and whisked off to the Special Care Baby Unit (SCBU) to be monitored, due to suspected poo-swallowing. Eww.      The hospital As prospective parents, nobody tells you about the SCBU. Although we were cheerfully informed of the myriad potential horrors of labour, we blithely assumed that we would be able to cuddle our newborn child and indulge in the promised skin-to-skin bonding as soon as it popped out. The odds of a baby ending up there are admittedly low, but the sombre ward was still close to fully-occupied when we warily trudged in. Bassinets and incubators bore tiny boys and girls of varying fragility, with some parents maintaining pensive beside vigils. From the whiteboard in reception we could see that one child had been born at 28 weeks and must have been living there for months. Although from this perspective Cha...

The Birthing Centre does exist. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Our local hospital offers a free tour for parents-to-be on a Thursday evening. What seemed like fifty other couples turned up alongside us, in an Attack of the Pregnant Women-style scenario. The Centre’s rooms are spacious and replete with birthing pools, sofas, birth balls and many other lovely facilities to enable your baby to arrive in five-star comfort. Tellingly, only one was occupied at that time. But, they say that as long as there are no complications with your labour, you too will be able to give birth here; and they say that plenty of lucky women do. They say a lot of things. My wife’s labour started at 4am on Tuesday April 18th, four days after our due date. The contractions were light and infrequent, and after I’d worked from home all day we went for a leisurely walk around the park and had dinner. At around 9pm, the pain set in and we retreated to our bedroom with stopwatch app in hand. As ...

With our first baby due to drop at the end of this week, you might think this a slightly odd time to be resurrecting this long-dormant blog, and you'd be right. But as many parents will know, if you're sensible and organised types you'll be fully prepared for your little bundle of "joy" to arrive from around 37 weeks into the pregnancy. And if, as is likely, your firstborn is a lazy sod who has no intention of turning up early, you will enter a curious limbo state, twiddling your thumbs until the point when your previously-peaceful existence is shattered forever. My preparations for said lifestyle change have included finishing my novel and submitting it for the consideration of literary agents. It's impossible to write that sentence without sounding like a pretentious berk, and I suspect the only thing worse than calling yourself a novelist is when that novel remains entirely unpublished. The problem was, a germ of a story involving a near-miss plane crash ...