Motherload

Summer is as dreadful as ever – it's not that we're not doing nice things, it's that woven into those things come horrible events like having too many friends with cancer at the moment, two with terminal brain cancers. This week I have been an adult. This week I visited my friend who has terminal brain cancer. We wanted to put on a 'play in a day' with her children, mine, and her cousin's, because she and her cousin used to love to do this in their own childhoods. The play eventually ended up as a two-minute iMovie, some kind of insane Arthurian Dance-Off. It was fun, but it was also not at all fun. It is not fun to see children playing, and know that their mother is going to be taken away from them. However much one can dress up the day with costumes, and ice cream, and pasta and iMovie. Yet this is what you do when there are children, because children want to play. They understand what is going on, but they want and need to play. They are full of unquencha...

Jon Day as cycle courier, back in the day I sat down with Jon Day, one-time cycle courier, now English literature lecturer, and had a very enjoyable discussion about cycling and his wonderful essay on it, Cyclogeography (published by the rather fabulous Notting Hill Editions). What I really loved about Jon's views on cycling was that he thought the British attitude to the bicycle was po-faced, while the French have a completely irreverent, subversive and inherently revolutionary take on le cyclisme . You can read the interview here – and take a look at Shiny New Books , which is all about what's hot in literature this summer.