Spotted this out of the front window a couple of days ago. Someone has been shedding his skin on our lawn. We have in past summers played host to a black snake who was probably about as big as this one. Not sure if it’s the same guy. Frankly, I’m not that interested in finding out. Snakes – just one …
How Blogging Works
Either: slave away over the keyboard searching for pithy insights into the creative life, trying to shine a small light on how all this stuff works. Persuade yourself that, over time, people will begin to see the merit of your ponderous musings and start coming back regularly. Or: post a video of your daughter eating ice cream and see the …
Married Writer and Publisher in Same Name Shock
This evening we are having a small party at our home to say goodbye to two of our dearest friends who are breaking our hearts by moving away from Columbia, to Washington D.C. David is a proper blogger – he is the managing editor of the excellent Talking Points Memo – and he is relocating to open up their Washington …
How to Eat Ice Cream
My father took these photographs while we in France last month. This is in a restaurant in Albi, near to my parents’ home. This is my daughter Catherine, who is four, and who is displaying a gratifyingly Epicurean streak. Good to the last drop, or dollop. Update: my mother has written to tell me, somewhat indignantly, that she was the …
Rise and Shine
Here’s a great post from Leo Babauta of the excellent Zen Habits blog about the benefits of getting up early. I started writing in the mornings because I realized that the only way I could guarantee myself time to write every day was if I started early, before the rest of the world was up. Evenings were often busy (less so …
The Benefits of Youth
There’s an old cliché that the US and the UK are two countries “divided by a common language”. Despite the long and generally amicable relationship between the two places (if you, you know, forget about the war of independence), people still relish the little things that divide us, like the funny way I talk. When I first arrived in America …
Suddenly Homesick…
… I have just seen that on October 15 Brad Mehldau will be playing a duo gig with Josh Redman at the Wigmore Hall in London. The Wigmore Hall is principally a classical music venue, but it will suit these two nicely, I would think. I remember going there on a school trip in about 1985 to listen to my …
A New Perspective
I went flying on Sunday morning. Hallam and I drove to an airfield about twenty miles away from where we live. It was a beautiful day – clear blue skies, and not a cloud to be seen. After a while a small plane landed gracefully on the short runway and taxied to a stop. Out of it climbed our friends …
Kind of Blue at 50
After talking about Christian McBride’s Kind of Brown a little while ago (which, by the way, was just as good as I thought it would be), I came across this on You Tube recently. The footage of So What on this film was recorded for TV (“The Sound of Miles Davis”) about 4 weeks after Kind of Blue itself was recorded. …
Lobster Pad Thai (a second helping)
[Apologies for rehashing an old post, but this was such a popular one when I first stuck it up last October that it seemed worth doing again. It drew more readers to the old blog than any other post – to the point where if you googled “lobster pad thai”, it was the first thing that popped up. And it’s …