Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 147

What I’ve Been Reading

Usually I’d post this on GoodReads but I find their interface a bit messy and frustrating, so I’m running it here this week. First off, I loved ‘Larchfield’ by Polly Clark, about a mother-to-be in a remote past of Scotland, fighting with the neighbours, trying to stay sane and write poetry, and finding a surprising […]

What’s The First Book You See In A Bookshop?

I grew up surrounded by strange experimental books from the likes of Brigid Brophy and BS Johnson. These were my touchstones, not Austen and Brontë. Being able to read great literature as well as other types of books doesn’t mean you have to prefer it. As more books than ever before are published, it’s interesting to […]

A Warning Against Originality

Somebody asked me the other day if ‘Plastic’ was ever published. I explained that it was a few years ago and is now an e-book too, so this piece is about the effort that went into the attempt to create a short, unclassifiable novel. I had grown up in the sixties surrounded by strange experimental […]

Living In ‘The London Bubble’ Means…

*uses West Country accent* ‘So what’s this ‘London Bubble’ we’ve been reading so much about then?’ It’s a state of mind that clouds us in the capital and stops us from thinking properly. It’s the thing we enter when we open the Evening Standard property pages, look at an article praising a stack of minuscule […]

The Leekfrith Torcs

A pair of detectorists gave up their hobby after repeatedly returning empty-handed, then, two decades after they had tried to find treasure in a field in Staffordshire, they came across  four Iron Age gold torcs; three collars and a bracelet-sized piece, including two made of twisted gold wire, two with trumpet shaped finials and one with […]

The Friday Song Returns!

As I was researching the swinging sixties,  I recalled this snippet from the film ‘Head’ directed by Bob Rafaelson. The Monkees copied everything the Beatles did, so when the Beatles made ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, a self-indulgent farrago that nevertheless spawned a staggering number of timeless hits, the Monkees made ‘Head’, which didn’t. Bits of it […]

5 Easy Things You Can Do On World Book Day

Here are five things you can do on World Book Day today, wherever you live. Literacy is priceless and self-perpetuating, and a skill that costs nothing to keep. Your discernment and taste in reading gets richer and deepens with every year of your life, except in the case of my father, who was stayed with […]

The Other American Wall

You never forget your first American. I met mine when I was 21. They were a couple visiting London for the first time who sat in a pub with a map before them, confused by the serpentine roads. I helped them to plot a tour across London, and ended up visiting them in San Diego, […]

Losing London’s Old Adverts

The old advertisements of London reveal a ghost map of a city long vanished. There’s already a website called ghostsigns that’s dedicated to painted wall advertisements on London buildings. Host Sam Roberts conducts walking tours and has a huge knowledge base of where all these signs are or were. He also projects light signs onto buildings […]

Mr Gay’s London Is Back In ‘The Fatal Tree’

Jake Arnott’s ‘The Fatal Tree’ is a ripping new 18th century yarn of London lowlife on the make and take, trying to stay one step ahead of the Fatal Tree itself (the gallows of Tyburn). It uses the story of  Jack Sheppard and more importantly the lesser-known Edgworth Bess, his woman, who led a ‘wicked […]