First day of term

I've been in the office today at MMU, having battled my way down the blustery Oxford Road, where a million new students are going up and down clutching paperwork and club flyers. I've been meeting the new first years and I've been beset the whole time with flashbacks to my own first week on campus, twenty one years ago. That start-of-term feeling comes back exactly the same time every year. The smell of freshly-sharpened pencils and a queasy tinge of nerves. The foamy coffee out of the department vending machine. The chemical tang of newly photocopied booklets...

Couple of links... I've just been sent a lovely review of 'Hands Up! - the Musical' on a blog by US fantasy writer Paul Genesse (http://paulgenesse.blogspot.com/)

and I just read Tom Baker's account of his signing sessions for 'The Stuff of Nightmares' in London earlier this month: http://www.tom-baker.co.uk/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=159

On the whole I'd say I've been enjoying the encroaching autumn. The weekend saw us wandering about the junk shops of Frodsham and hunting through a vast, wonderful barn filled with secondhand books for ancient pulpy paperbacks that I'm sure to review right here at some point. Also, I've been listening to the Radio 4 adaptations of Miss Marple stories. I seem to prefer June Whitfield's incarnation to any of the TV ones. I wonder why that is? She really plays up the snobby side to Miss M and that's the bit of the books I have a problem with. But there's such a light touch to those radio versions. Also, I think of those stories as being very verbal: stories being filtered through different view-points and all of it discursive rather than being dynamic or very visual...

Also, I've been reading Stephen King again for the first time in ages. After being obsessed as a teenager for a while with his stuff, I'd gone off him for years. He's too messy, too big, too rambling, too cheap in some of those latterday novels I ploughed through. Every few years I'd try him again. Bag of Bones. Ho-hum. Dreamcatcher. Ugh. Nothing could match sitting up all night on Christmas Eve when I was seventeen, hooked on Salem's Lot. Anyway - reading his new story collection - 'Just After Sunset' - there's a story called 'Gingerbread Girl' that gripped me until I felt sick. I don't know if I liked it, but it made me forget I was reading. And that means it's good, I think.