Wow. First a specialist radio programme, now a specialist magazine. I am All Over the specialist media this weekend.
I was interviewed in The Bookseller for a feature on English PEN. The article doesn’t seem to be online yet but you can read the article in all its printed glory below. Eagle eyed readers will note that three of the pictures are by yrstrly, too. As with the radio interview, I share the limelight with a colleague: this time, Writers in Prison Programme Manager Cat Lucas.
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Category: Diary (Page 123 of 301)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
Last week, I was interviewed by Peter Spafford for East Leeds FM. He asked about the work of English PEN and the free speech campaigns we are running.
You can listen to the interview here. My five minutes of fame comes at exactly 61 minutes into the show. There’s a funny point in my monologue where Peter takes a breath to ask another question, but I carry on talking. I should learn to speak in shorter sentences.
Later in the same show, my English PEN colleague Irene Garrow talks about her experience as a writer-in-residence in the prison system, and the reading and writing workshops she organizes with prisoners. Her slot starts at about 105 minutes.
Earlier this week I uploaded this short clip of a train pulling in to Farringdon Station, as filmed by the eight platform cameras and piped to the array of monitors near the top of the platform.
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I am sure I have made this point somewhere before on this blog, but a quick search through my archives doesn’t reveal it, so…
All this business about bankers and CEO bonuses makes me uneasy. The pattern is now very familiar: it transpires that some despised ‘fat cat’ – a banker or the head of a quango, say – is due to be given a huge bonus on top of their already huge monthy remuneration. Outrage ensues. The aforementioned ‘fat cat’ is chased by the press and slandered by politicians and interest groups. The ‘Fat cat’ eventually issues a statement saying he will give back the money.
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I went to a Blue State Digital event earlier in the week and assembled my tweeted aide memoirs on Storify: Blue State Digital THINKS. We discussed digital trends that are now mainstream.
Its a rather long Storify, so I won’t embed it here, but its worth pasting in the philosophical bit about mobile phone’s as an extension of one’s brain:
A mobile phone is not an implant, but it functions a bit like the bionic enhancements of science fiction lore. Crucially, it should make us more productive, because of the time we save and the time we find (for example, when we sitting down on our commute, or sitting down doing our ablutions).
Photo by Jeen Na