Getting Out of the Smoke

Living in London has become utterly intolerable. Repeated intense heatwaves, plus the moronic new trend for tuning cars and motorbikes to sound like machine gun fire has had a terrible effect on my nerves, and ultimately on my health. So far this summer I’ve spent more time hiding out on the coast than I’ve spent at home.

The result is that Georgina and I have made the very difficult decision to leave London for good. In fact, we’ll be moving into our new home on the Norfolk coast in a couple of month’s time, and life is going to be very different. As soon as we get settled, and I’ve had a chance to set up my studio again, I’ll be re-starting the podcast. It’ll be very different this time – hopefully resisting the temptation to rely on heavily formatted repeating items, and synthetic running characters.

That said, I really enjoyed making all three series of “Luff Actually”, particularly the weekly process of writing songs for “Sonny Keys & the Flat Notes”, and discovering for the first time the awesome possibilities of AI assisted music production. I’m very proud of the new album - you can listen to it free here, or you can buy it on vinyl

And if you want to catch up with recent episodes you can find the podcast here

In other news, I was excited to learn recently that my screenplay for “Muddlleton” has won an award for Best Unproduced Screenplay at the CKF International Film Festival in the UK. It was also a nominee at the Prisma Film Awards in Rome. If you haven’t got around to it yet, you can read the novel here

When “Muddleton” finishes serializing at the end of next week, I’ll be publishing another of my novels on this Substack. Called “The Trench Foot and Bullnose Morris Men”, it’s set in World War One, and it picked up an unproduced screenplay award at the Venice Film Festival in 2023.

Thanks for continuing to subscribe to this Substack. More updates soon. Stay cool.