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[justanotherfuckingusername]

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[robinallender]

Some recent books I’ve enjoyed. 

The Jeff Tweedy book is part rumination and part creative aid to that most mystical of pursuits, songwriting. I love his advice about ‘hot-wiring’ language – making the familiar unfamiliar through unusual juxtapositions – and his myth-busting about creative ‘gifts’: ‘I’d like to believe that everybody, if allowed to pursue their dreams and passions, would have a gift for something.’ He also advocates taking naps which I wholeheartedly agree with. 

Megan Nolan’s debut novel is an emotional powerhouse of brutal, brilliant honesty. Best read while listening to the new Self Esteem record I found. 

I enjoyed the new, intricately-plotted Ian Rankin novel. As an aside it mentions John Lennon’s 1969 car crash (‘If you’re going to have a car crash, try to arrange for it to happen in the Highlands’), proof that everything leads back to The Beatles. As ever with thrillers, I always wish that there were fewer crimes and more descriptions of paperwork and going to pubs. Maybe I need to write an unthrilling thriller myself. 

Speaking of pubs, I read The Last Landlady by Laura Thompson for the Moon Under Water podcast. A brilliant evocation of a lost world, that is as much about nostalgia itself as it is about pubs. Very up my street in short. 

Also among her small collection was a photograph of the old pub itself. It was a close-up of the bar, nothing more – in Hulton Getty tones, not quite sepia, more a sombre maroon-brown – but it thrilled me as a Sickert would have done. So rich in recessive depths, within which lay something so meaningfully, so meaninglessly, ordinary: just the world as it was when the pub was so intrinsic as to be scarcely noticeable, simple the screensaver to one’s life. How I craved entry to that photograph, for one evening! To smell the wax polish on the wood, the overflow of beer beneath the pumps, the nostril-burning cigarettes – and to be unaware of it all, to be.