HOT SUMMER NEWS 4 U (kinda)

Tl;dr - I made a new issue of Minor Leagues which you can pre-order here for delivery probably in late July.

Hello everyone

Hope you’re all doing ok in the heat/cold/wet/dry world. It’s been hot in Bristol - though it’s raining right now, thankfully - and summer has been a wild ride - a lot of good times and also stretched-thin times too, a sparkling mess, a calm joy, a stressful breakfast of a life. Things that happened have included moving out of home for a good seven weeks while we ‘have some work done on our house’ (are we grown up enough to ‘have some work done on our house’?! Apparently so); driving to Manchester then the Lake District the Dundee then Edinburgh then a different bit of the Lake District; going to talk about WHERE? in Bishops Castle to the Dylan Thomas Summer School students and getting to hang out with my friend Mike Parker, make new friends, sleep in the van, and breathe in the countryside air. Mostly though it’s been the experience of watching our daughter grow and change that has been the most constant amazing, frazzling, probably-boring-for-everyone-else-but-life-defining-for-us thing; and it can be hard, to constant, or insistent, or whatever, but everyday I see us being a family and am bowled over by the absolute wonder of it all and the sheer gratitude of having our daughter and my wife in my world. Love, hey?

Here’s the news.

S x

NEW ZINE!

Minor Leagues 13 is available for pre-order (should ship late July-ish? It’s at the printers at the moment). In the new issue: becoming a parent; new life; joy; fear; the passage of time; glow in the dark shellfish; letters to friends, family, ghosts, a brook; lists; pictures, words and poems.

This issue is built from the scrappy notes and photos I took during the first few months of L.B.’s life, but also picks up where Minor Leagues 12 left off in about March 2024. £1 from every copy goes to Baby Bank Network Bristol who collect donations of pre-loved baby equipment, clothing, toys and other essentials and pass them on to families experiencing poverty or crisis in Bristol.

Pick up a copy here if you fancy one.

FORTEAN TIMES?!

In crazy I’d-like-to-tell-you-this-because-it’s-exciting-but-it-sounds-like-I’m-niche-bragging announcements, I’ve written an article for Fortean Times, the magazine of weird news. That stuff about exploring Pluckley’s reputation as the ‘most haunted village in England’ I mentioned in a previous newsletter should, all being well, be the cover story for the September issue. I’ve been a subscriber to FT for a good fifteen years and a reader for thirty and I’m totally stoked. I’ve peaked.

A frame from my comic What Happened about the summer of 1995 in which I am reading FT.

WHERE IS HOME?

I gave a talk at work about WHERE? the other day, and how the book explores ideas of ‘home’ - finding home, imagining it, inventing it and stuff like that. It was recorded and if you’re interested you can watch me waffle and wave my arms around in the video below.

FINALLY

A list of cold places in hot weather I would like to take my family to at this moment

• A small pool of mountain meltwater in the grounds of the Treehouse Backpacker Hotel, Grünau im Almtal, Austria, July 2001, me and Tom swimming in our pants, 7am.

• Bassenthwaite Lake, or Lazonby community pool, May 2025, L.B’s first swim.

• The correct side of the impossible, invisible barrier between the 30 degree heat and 10000% humidity and the icy air conditioned air at the front door of a small house in Kyoto, a wall of water and heat and ice, July 2017.

• The walk-in fridge in the kitchens of the George and Dragon, Marlow, summer 2002. If someone ordered a dessert at the bar, we (and not the chefs/waiting staff) were in charge of making it, so I’d lurk in the fridge looking for ingredients to shirk work. I remember the floor was greasy.

• Other places, yet to be found.