A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned I was invited to give a talk in Pecha Kucha format at the Dundee Rep theatre. I chose the topic of my Millennium Bridges tours from 2023 and 2025. It’s worth looking back at that previous entry to find out about my preparations. A few days beforehand, I was told the running order…

PechaKucha Night Dundee returns for Vol. 32 this November!PechaKucha Night Dundee is back at Dundee Rep Theatre on Friday 7 November 2025 with another incr

The first entry to this blog was posted on 10 October 2013, making it 12 years old last month. The intent was to create a deadline each week so I would keep writing regularly. That's going well so far because when this entry is published, it'll be number 641, or an average of at least one entry a week. But how many people are likely to read it?

On Wednesday 26 November, we’re hosting An evening of Guardian culture with Tim Dowling, Stuart Heritage and Meera Sodha, we need your help to bring one real domestic gripe onto the stage

I'm pleased to report I've been invited to take part in a Pecha Kucha event on Friday 7 November at the Dundee Rep Theatre. These talks follow a rigid format. Speakers need to prepare 20 slides, which will be projected for exactly 20 seconds apiece, so the accompanying speech must match the time available. Less rigid is the choice of topic, which can be almost anything, provided it's suitable for a family audience.

Find out which to avoid if you are concerned about weight gain.

I have a couple of upcoming projects that I'm not ready to talk about just yet. To fill the gap, I've instead looked backwards in time to the entry closest to today: 26 October 2015. With the title Relentlessness, the entry described a hectic week. The open-mic night Hotchpotch held an event aboard the vintage HMS Unicorn, the Dundee Literary Festival had just been and gone, and the artist studios WASPS held an open weekend.

Last week's entry was all about postcards. In writing about these, however, it was necessary to touch upon its replacement technology: SMS. I realised I had more to write on the matter. so today's entry effectively serves as a part 2. When the first SMS-capable handsets became available, they wouldn't contain a full keyboard. Instead, each letter was mapped to the number pad in the following semi-standardised formation:

Although postcards are now virtually obsolete in daily life, I can remember a time when they were used to enter competitions, to cast votes in polls, and to let friends and family know you'd reached your holiday destination safely. But when I'm going away for a day or two, I like to maintain the last of those traditions. In most cases, I know I'll arrive back home before the mail does, even when it's within Great Britain, but it doesn't diminish the surprise for the recipient.

Most of the time, I find it easy to think of what the characters in my stories should be called. Their names often appear at the same time as the storyline. I wrote one such piece in 2014 titled Adrian Eats the World, which appeared at the same time as the title. Until I found the file while writing this, I thought that was still its name.

For the last ten years, I've run a weekly writing group. This has almost always been on a Tuesday and with a co-organiser. I inititally joined in 2010, when the group was still a branch of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I took over in 2015 once the original organisers graduated and moved away. After withdrawing our affiliation from NaNoWriMo two years ago, two of us now jointly run it as an independent group.

An increase in solar activity can cause radio blackouts, satellite damage, and even power grid failures