Over this long weekend I have all three days on my own – the children are on a float trip in the Ozarks with their mother – and a long list of domestic chores to get done in that time, to say nothing of (I hope) further progress with the new book. In the spirit of prevarication that I cling …
Countdown!
There’s so much going on at the moment that I often lose track of what day of the week it is. So this is a quick post to bring you up to date with a few snippets of news, then I’m off to spend the weekend doing legal work, catching up with the stuff that has been piling up, both …
Write, Erase, Repeat.
Since my recent post about my new Kindle, I have been thinking a lot about technology. On Saturday night the kids and I had a chew-and-view. We ate tortellini and watched Shrek the Third, renting the movie on my laptop from amazon instant play and having it transmitted to the TV. Who needs Netflix? I don’t even need to wait for …
Unplugging
I’ve just come back from a few days away from Missouri. The children were not with me over Thanksgiving this year, and of course my family all live thousands of miles away, so there didn’t seem to be much point hanging around. Turkey for one, sir? So I took off, for a quick visit to Philadelphia – somewhere I’d never …
Only Connect
Very early one morning a few weeks ago, as I was sitting down for my daily writing session, I saw a tweet from one of my closest friends, with a link to a YouTube video. Now, this friend and I, we go back a long way. And because I love this friend, and because he has probably the most refined …
English Accents
One of the reasons why I never contemplated a career as a litigator when I re-qualified as a lawyer in the United States was that I had visions of my delivering elegantly-crafted closing arguments only to have the jury look at each other and ask each other quietly what the guy with the funny accent had been talking about. And …
Get Snappy, Get Happy
My recent trip to Maine has got me thinking a lot about lobsters. You can’t go for more than about two minutes up there without encountering a lobster somewhere – either on a roadside sign, a tea towel, a postcard, or – if you’re lucky – in a restaurant. I ate a lot of lobster while I was there. Once …
Maine
Earlier this week I arrived back in Missouri after a blissful week in Maine. From ME to MO. What a difference a letter makes. I wrote a lot, read a lot, climbed a few mountains, and ate an awful lot of delicious fresh seafood. My cottage was on a secluded cove near Acadia National Park. It was a one-room wooden …
Friends in Funny Places
My name is Alex, and I am a lawyer. I began my first legal job in a large firm in London almost exactly nineteen years ago, and I’ve practiced law in England, France, and the United States. It’s not something that I talk about much on this blog, because (a) this is a blog about writing, mainly, (b) I want …
Charades
Since I’ve been looking after the children on my own in the new place we have instigated a new bedtime tradition: charades. (Pronounced CHARARDS or CHARAIDS depending on your inclination/country of origin.) It’s a lot of fun, although we discovered pretty quickly that we have a limited repertoire of mutual books/films/songs/etc to draw from. I am thankfully unfamiliar with the …