Hastings: Seaside Secondhand & Dishermen

I love the English seaside, especially out of season. No idea why, but I like overcast pebble beaches, eating candy floss on benches, deserted crazy golf and gaming arcades. So a surprise pre-birthday weekend away to Hastings and St Leonards-on-Sea, next door towns full of bric-a-brac shops and Formica tabled fish'n'chip places, was very well chosen indeed. Here's the view from my bed at the brilliant Hastings House this morning:

And what a bed - perhaps the biggest, comfiest one I've ever slept in. Add in free Jaffa cakes with the room's tea and coffee, a rainforest shower and wallpaper that could be ants or dancing girls, and it's kind of surprising we even went out.

Going on the evidence, Hastings is a perilous place. The Fishermen's Museum wasn't so much a museum as a roguish gallery of foxy earring'd coves in yellow waders that we nicknamed Dishermen. I must have been in awe, cos I forgot to photograph any of them, but did take a pic of this delightful flag.

Next door, the Shipwreck Museum was a grisly but fascinating trip through all the buried ships, treasure and lives still out there at sea, including the bones of an 18th century cabin boy murdered during a mutiny, plenty of intact muskets and bottles of Dutch gin.

The New Town isn't great, but the Old Town's a patchwork of tobacconists, cafes and bric-a-brac stores with insanely cheap crockery, furniture, books and just plain Stuffs (you'll need to rummage though).

Shops that were too dark for photos but worth a look - Pearl & Queenie (fancy jewellery), Wardrobe (secondhand designer), Antiques Warehouse (everything, from £1.50 enamel Lenin badges to £400 leather sofas), Robert's Rummage (books, maps, glassware), and Little Treasures (ladies vintage with a 50s/60s skew). My favourite, though, was the websiteless 20th Century Design, and their £20 Sixties coffee tables and £8 sets (sets!) of Babycham glasses.

St Leonards is much smaller, like a limpet spooning onto Hastings for dear life, but equally worth an explore. St. Clements dishes up slow cooked meat, local fish and a dessert menu that has me slobbering over my laptop in memory. Love Cafe was one of those endearing hippie free-for-all places with Tai Chi ads, chummy servers, paintings everywhere, high-strength coffee and crepes nicknamed 'Johnny Depp'.

And, next door, we found the best secondhand shop ever, the kind that makes me want to charter a van to stock up on ridiculous bits of Sixties tat that I do not need at all. Look - Russian language posters! Cheapo G Plan furniture! Bakelite phones!

Luckily, they don't have a website, so I'm just going to cross my fingers that absolutely nothing sells until I have learnt how to drive a van. Ahem. Last night I was so relaxed that I fell asleep watching Arrested Development in my glasses. It might even have been before midnight. What a great weekend.

Only Shallow

You know those days when you're throwing your hands at the keyboard as fast as you can for twelve hours straight, pausing only to throw your hands at the keyboard and CONSUME? Last Friday was one of those days.

I bought this:

Whistles lurex jumper

And this:

Dress with '3' print, NW3

And this:

TBA at Urban Outfitters, reduced to £40

Yes, I know (and I'm using this post to shame myself into not shopping for a few months).

(Also to remind myself I'm probably a little 'lived in' for neon pink micro dresses).

Three-book break

This Christmas, I mostly read and, for once, they were all corkers.

Wise Children

Another Xmas holiday side project was working on a V&A book about Hollywood's Golden Age so I found this Angela Carter book in a Crouch End charity shop at just the right time. It's a rich, dense, dazzlingly mad romp through the lives of the Lucky Chance sisters, Dora and Nora, through their time hoofing it in the music halls and their complex family tree.

My favourite Amazon review comes from an unwise child; "It is just random anecdotes and bizarre stories unfortunately trapped together in over 200 pages of confusing and untalented literature. This is coming from a student who got a stars at GCSE level and actually an a grade in the AS English."

The Basic Eight

As someone from the Secret History generation, I'm a sucker for a campus novel. The Basic Eight, written by Daniel 'Lemony Snicket' Handler (no, I haven't read any Snicket, yes, I did once meet him at a press event and thought he was super-clever and charming) is Heathers in book form; all about a bunch of shapeshifting teens in San Francisco getting murdery, if they can find the time between dinner parties. It's funny and sharp, and the heroine, Flannery Culp, is unforgettable.

Disgusting Bliss: The Brass Eye of Chris Morris

There's something pretty great about finding things out for yourself. One of my only childhood television memories is watching the very final Blackadder episode, where they charge into the trenches, and myself and my three brothers and sisters all bursting into tears at once. We watched Ab Fab as a family; my brother and I started to get the jokes on Have I Got News For You at the same time.

But, perhaps two years after my dad banned me from playing Bis and PJ Harvey in his car (shame on you, Dad, look at Bis' latest state-of-the-nation album...), I found Brass Eye and I was smitten.

This bio of the genius Chris Morris is interesting for any Day Today/Alan Partridge megafan like me, but, given that it's about someone who is famously private, there isn't much on, er, Chris Morris. Instead you've got a bunch of famous comedy types (who all know each other; I'd never realised Lee and Herring worked on the radio show that preceded The Day Today) rinsing each other.

Like Iannucci on Coogan - "Were it not for the fact that he has this fantastic gift for comedy, Steve is fundamentally a guy who reads a lot of car magazines". ZING, Armando, ZING.

So, er, I'm out of books. Any tips?

Revert to type

I was going to write one of those end of year round-up blogs, like I did last year, but, what with everything else that's happened in the world in 2011, my stuff seems like hubristic small fry. Yes, even more hubristic than having your own blog in the first place.

Next year, I'd like to be proper cracking at my day job (working on the wonderful Google Places). I'd like to write more and write better. And I'd like to remember to be kind, cos that's the virtue I appreciated most in others last year.

To prevent accusations of non-shallowness, I've included a picture of my two favourite Xmas pressies; a turquoise typewriter and a gigantic Seventies style craftsy owl necklace.

Thanks for reading and Happy New Year!

Curtis Brown Creative course

2011 was a crazy up and down kind of year for me, but one of the undoubted highlights was doing the Curtis Brown creative course. 

Run by mega-agency Curtis Brown, whose clients range from David 'One Day' Nicholls to Twihottie Robert Pattison, it's a twelve-week novel writing course that first ran in April. I didn't apply for it then, but talented old Catherine Bray did, and reminded me to apply for the September course. 

I was lucky enough to get in, and thought I'd blog for future ditherers. The course is firmly focused on the commercial (I don't mean in style, because the fifteen of us on the course were working across nearly every genre, from literary to not), but writing a publishable novel and getting a little insight into the business side of publishing. 

Lessons were 7-9 on Wednesday and Thursday nights. Wednesdays were talks from industry insiders, from publishers to editors and successful writers, and Thursday were half lessons (editing, agent's letters, dialogue) and half workshopping each other's work. Add to that a couple of tutorials with the course directors, the brilliant Anna Davis and Chris Wakling, and you have a course that is well worth the money (it was £1,600). On a weekly basis, it's four hours of lessons, a few more hours for going through other's writing or any homework, plus the time you'll want to spend working on your novel. I found combining the course with a demanding full-time job difficult sometimes but fine with a little multitasking; others travelled from South Wales, or left their jobs to concentrate on their writing.

The group were, and are, amazing. We have varied backgrounds and experiences but, without an exception, they were all completely committed to the course, working on interesting pieces, and generous and useful with their feedback. To round off the course, we submitted 10,000 words of our works in progress for feedback sessions with Curtis Brown agents, and I'm rather chuffed to have Jonny 'William Boyd/Hari Kunrzu/Martine McCutcheon' Geller. Here's my group, after our session with unexpected charismabomb Jeffrey Archer. I'm the one swooning towards him in black.  

I had high hopes when I first started the course - namely, a full first draft finished by my birthday at the end of January. To be honest, I'm no nearer that in word terms, but I'm much closer in better, subtler ways; I now have a proper story, a stronger picture of what I'm good and bad at (I find plotting tough) and, above all, a group that'll carry on meeting up next year to encourage each other. I'm starting 2012 more optimistic than ever about my chances of properly writing a publishable novel, and that's all down to Curtis Brown. 

I couldn't recommend the course more. 

Free Crappy Portraits

I just got the best Christmas present - a picture of me, done by Free Crappy Portraits!

And, yes, there's nothing like seeing a list of your likes (rendered beautifully as a desk full of Jason Schwartzman and a yellow dress I'd love to own) for making you realise you're a megacliche.

Happy Christmas!

Feliz Navidad

Every year, my housemate's brother Juan makes a Christmas video with his friends.

Last year's video was a fluffy take on Telephone.



This year, it's Katy Perry getting politicised.



So fun; hope you like them too.