Hello and welcome.
I am a novelist, occasional essayist and screenwriter, and I am now well into my seventh decade. And despite my advancing years I am still employed in those fields of endeavour, although screenplays have taken over recently, for various reasons that I will talk about here, at some point in the future. But the day jobs mean that I don’t get to sound off much about my enthusiasms, not publicly, anyway, which is where Substack is going to come in handy. I have watched a lot of football, and a lot of TV programmes., and a lot of movies. I have read a lot of books, and listened to a ton of music, in most genres. I continue to do those things. The advantage of being a 67-year-old fan who doesn’t have a proper job means that I have been able to explore avenues that you might have been too busy to wander down. Every week I’ll be recommending something that you might want to read, watch or listen to, something you might have missed. I love my stuff, and I can’t bear it that you might not know some of it.
There’s no point in me recommending sport, of course. You either already know about it or don’t want to know about it, and anyway I don’t recommend it, particularly. I don’t recommend loving a particular team, anyway. This afternoon my team Arsenal won, against their deadly local rivals, and yet the whole experience was mostly miserable. I seek pleasure from culture, but sport offers mostly pain and disappointment, year after year. That won’t stop me writing about it on Substack, though. I think about it and talk about it, and it’s an enormous part of my social life, my family life and my mood. I wish it wasn’t, but there you go. Many of my closest friends are Arsenal fans (they usually have Arsenal PLUS something – music, movies, etc) and I have managed to turn my two youngest sons into obsessives. It’s in the air that I breathe.
I want to write about work, too – the process, but not, you know “my process”. (You write how you want to write. Henry James and EL James both got the job done, in their own ways.) However, I have a lot to say about what can go wrong and, less frequently, what goes right, especially in the world of film. And maybe I do know something about sustaining a career while staying more or less sane.
Occasionally I will write about my country, which, like many countries in the world, has been bafflingly crazy for the last decade or so. It is hilarious, though, a lot of the time. So you might get the odd Letter from England, if I can convey the hilarity rather than the despair and the rage. Some of these Letters will of necessity bang on about the old days, and how cheap everything was. Older people like bringing that up.
Oh, I don’t know. I just want to have some fun, and provide some fun, and if you find something enriching or useful or amusing, then I will have achieved something with my time. Thanks for reading even this much.
I reread High Fidelity a few weeks back - still hits all the right notes in me. A total treat to have you here
This here is why I love Substack. I can read this great opening 'hello' and tell you directly that High Fidelity was one of those books that made a misfit kid feel a little less weird for liking so many different types of music, and for still listening to records instead of downloads. Thank you.