Sweet Nothings

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 ...

Beautiful Windy City panorama (wind not pictured) The 2016 edition of the Goulds’ annual Stateside trip saw a move away from the West and East coasts, instead taking in a chunk of the Midwest and some good ole Southern comforts. Masochists can read all about my 2011 visit to Chicago here , complete with tortuous title pun. My wife and I covered much of the same ground this year, the main difference being an increased, nay all-consuming, focus on food. Indeed, this entire holiday presents further evidence that we are now selecting destinations purely on the basis of treat availability, and in the sincere belief that calories consumed abroad will magically have no effect. Hence we enjoyed a  Ghirardelli hot fudge sundae and stocked up on bags of their absurdly moreish chocolate squares, abandoned our salads at the Michigan Avenue branch of the  Cheesecake Factory halfway through to ensure room for the mountainous slice of eponymous dessert, and made sure to sample s...

Wolves FC have recently announced a  new shirt sponsorship deal for next season with The Money Shop , a payday loan firm. This being 2016 and the internet being the internet, an online petition was swiftly set up and has amassed plenty of outraged signatories. The modern malaise of one-click activism is a topic for another day, but what I do find curious about this saga is the common refrain that Wolves should not be associating themselves with such ne'er-do-well companies because we are a 'family club'. This does rather beg the question of whether any football club wouldn't consider itself a Family Club in this day and age. Actually, the answer is probably Leeds United, who according to an employment tribunal were guilty of unfair dismissal and sex discrimination when they sacked the partner of former manager Neil Redfearn, and have an owner in Massimo Cellino whose titanic self-delusion appears to be matched only by his chronic sexism, if his alleged views...

Stephen Hawking and the Kray twins might not be obvious bedfellows, but there is a slightly tenuous comparison (not the last of those in this post) to be made between Brian Helgeland's Legend  and Oscar-tastic Hawking bio The Theory of Everything. Both are based on accounts by the protagonist's spouses, with the male heroes/villains being mostly seen through their eyes, in case you were wondering. Neither Ronnie nor Reggie had a hitherto-unknown interest in astrophysics, as far as I know. Emily Browning narrates the film as Frances, a fresh-faced East End girl looking for a way out, who is seduced by 'normal' Kray brother Reggie at the start. We are then taken on a gleeful whistle-stop tour of the Krays' manor-cum-empire, including a childishly exciting tit-for-tat feud with Sarf London's Richardson family, and Reggie's club where celebrities and aristocrats enjoy the frisson of rubbing shoulders with members of the underworld. This opening part of t...

Yesterday, I watched highlights of Chris Froome’s latest spectacular Tour de France mountain ascent, where he burst clear from the pack with over 6km left, gaining huge chunks of time right until the end and echoing his mountaintop stage wins in the 2013 Tour. This morning, I sifted through the online postmortem discussions, where the overriding consensus was clear: this guy must be doping. Not only that, but Froome’s Team Sky colleagues Richie Porte and Geraint Thomas also produced stunning rides, beating established team leaders in the process who didn’t have anybody else to work for. Accepted wisdom in cycling says that whole teams can’t be this dominant over the rest of the field without chemical assistance. My favourite is this race from the dawn of the EPO era when three Gewiss riders casually destroy the field at a frightening speed.     Yesterday’s other big story was that somebody appeared to have hacked into Sky’s data logs and had uploaded footage of...

Update: Oh dear, no new posts since I got back from my honeymoon. In my defence, I’ve been trying to write a novel, a process which mostly involves finding new ways to procrastinate from actually sitting down to write a novel. I’ve found that buying a house, moving house and decorating a new house work quite well in that regard. Anyway, free movie preview time! There is so much depressing stuff on the internet (or at least the parts of the internet that men tend to visit) about how women aren’t funny, and how dare these silly tarts be starring in comedy films when there are more than enough male comics to do the job. One of the leaders of the fightback, ironically, is Paul Feig, who directed arguably the best mainstream comedy of recent years in Bridesmaids, and who always features women in promenant roles, including his upcoming all-girl Ghostbusters remake (which would blatantly be SO much better with Sandler or Ferrell in it, right lads?). Melissa McCarthy seems to b...

If you were lucky enough to be at my recent wedding, here is the stuff I wrote about each of the seven casinos that we used as tables during the evening meal. If you weren't there, you probably won't have a clue what's going on, but you're welcome to have a read anyway. Opened : December 18, 1993 Cost to build:  $1 billion Rooms : 6,852 Total gaming space : 15,930 sq m Slot machines : 2500+ Ben and Becky stayed at the Grand for three nights. We were impressed with the size of the room, which was bigger than both our current and former flats, and had a TV which spun around so you could watch it from either the bed or the sofa (to be fair, Ben was more interested in this than Becky). We also paid to see Bon Jovi at the Garden Arena, but then the Grand Canyon re-opened so we ended up going there instead. We mostly don’t regret it. The MGM originally had a Wizard of Oz theme, including an ‘Emerald City’ attraction complete with the Yellow Brick Road and a...