was a week of performance.

It began naked, on the windswept Cornish coast, before the good people of British Naturism.

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has died. After a decade of campaigning in Parliament Square he has lost his battle against lung cancer.

I remember asking him back in 2007, in the days after the Nelson Mandela statue went up in Parliament Square, whether he would like a statue erected in his memory. Continue reading →

on Cooper’s Hill was officially cancelled this year.

Here’s the unofficial version from last weekend:

is what I have before me. It starts tomorrow in Swindon, before heading cross-country to Lincoln for a talk the following afternoon. Obviously the drive isn’t that far but it takes a while to pack up the show and get my entourage loaded up – think several coaches emblazoned with the book’s cover, in-coach sleeping areas, dieticians, a make-up team, pyrotechnics, sound engineers etc. In Lincoln I’ll be talking about eccentrics rather than groups, and the following day the nationwide tour marches on London for a homecoming gig at the Big Green Bookshop. Very much hope to see you at one of these.

p.s. turns out that some authors really do live like this. Here’s the bus used by Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl books (image from babygotbooks blog).

I suspect, written about now as much as he will be in years to come.

The event of his protest as much as its sheer length seems to say a lot about our judicial system along with the English tradition of protest. Here is a bloody-minded protester at the very heart of a Protestant land. If he ever moves on, there really should be a monument in his memory – a bed of forget-me-nots as Haw once suggested.

Yesterday I saw this wonderful piece on the man by Sam Leith, in the Evening Standard. In my eccentrics book I describe him (Haw not Leith) as a Captain Ahab figure gazing endlessly at the white whale over the road that is Parliament. Leith compares him to another Melville creation, Bartleby, as you’ll see. I think this works.