This Busy Monster

Not so much time for blogging today! Term's starting and I'm gathering my stuff together for my online class this evening. I'm teaching novel-writing for the next eleven weeks, online and at home - while at the same time trying to meet all my own writing deadlines. Wish me luck! I hope I'll still be able to blog here while I'm on with stuff.

The snow's going! It drizzled coldly in south Manchester yesterday and it all looks perilously icy outside. I really enjoyed those days of snowmen and ladies and snow pandas and giraffes in people's gardens.

I'm still reading my Armada books of Monsters. Last night I read R Chetwynd-Hayes' final story in the last of the series. It's about a boy with an unspecified illness who lives at the top of a tower block. The visiting doctor tells him he has special sight and can probably see creatures that no one else can see. And he does - a flying bull with no legs and a scarlet nose, who breathes in clouds and forces gales upon the world. There are tiny flying old women in this story too, and other strange mites floating about in the air. Only certain people know that they are there. It's a rather gentle story, all about magic and belief. This story - and the others in this set of six books - make monsters into creatures that you'd rather bump into than not. They're books for kids who read things like The Unexplained and Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World and wanted it all, more than anything, to be true. To be real.

(Maybe that's why I found last night's first episode of 'being human' season 2 a bit miserable and dull? In that show being a monster seems such an earnest business. Not much fun at all. What a programme! They try too hard! All that *acting*. All that *writing*. Horror for me always implies a touch of the macabre - and that means having just a *bit* of a sense of humour...)

BTW - RE my heading. Whatever happened to the band called This Busy Monster? I know two brilliant songs of theirs - one about a werewolf, one about Edward Gorey. I've only ever heard them online. Where are the records? Is the band still about?