Before I go . . .

Just off with my girls for a few days at my parents' in sunny Berkshire. Taking some work (as always) but also a stack of books, and confidently expect to disappear for many hours between the covers of a good few of them, as well, no doubt, as dipping into random volumes plucked from the shelves in the spare bedroom.

I'll be off air for a while, but I leave you, gentle readers, with this fragrant [very] mixed bouquet of seasonal links to some sites which have caught my attention in the last day or two.

The test launch of BookRabbit – a new and different kind of interactive online bookstore, which hopes to inspire a more personal and user-friendly relationship with its customers and also encourages buying in local independent bookshops as much as it does ordering online. Every book details page will have a link to booksellers, so readers can check to see if the book they want is currently available from a local store. As Keiron Smith, MD of SamedayBooks.com and the Chertsey and Worthing Bookshops explains:


“real books should have a real presence - I love nosing at other people's bookcases, the weird juxtapositions of books people choose to keep and have gathered from many sources seems to me to be both a real window into someone, their passions, and also has the ability to make connections between books that couldn't be further from the 'if you love you'll like' manufactured link. Our simple idea was that people could upload bookcase images and display them as part of their profile, then make them browsable by clicking through the books on them into other books and other bookcases . . .”

It all sounds like a terrifically good idea and I’m looking forward to giving it a whirl when it goes live later this month.

Painful book-world contrast here with the sad, sad, awful stuff going on at The Friday Project ,which news has provoked some justifiably sympathetic comments from supporters who understand the knife-edge relationship between risk and reward, success and failure when steering a fledgling business, and some equally justifiably raw and venomous remarks from writers and freelancers who are wondering how, exactly, they are supposed to eat and pay the mortgage if they never get paid for the work they’ve done for TFP. Having been on both sides of similar fences (though thankfully not this particular one), my own sympathies are profound, but pretty much equally divided in this instance.

A reminder on Asylum of how intoxicating it was to read the complete novels of Carson McCullers, straight off, one after the other in my early twenties. I’ve never re-visited them but I feel it’s time I did. Ditto the 1968 film of her most famous book, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which I hazily remember from one TV viewing in the 70s as being excellent, but which annoyingly seems only to be available in Region 1 DVD format (and I don’t have a swanky multi-region player, grrrr).

Thanks to Diane for the link to these fab Woodland Trust Wellies £5 from each sale goes to the WT. I'm very tempted - they make my boring old green Hunters look dull, dull, dull.

I enjoyed India Knight's thoughts on Carla Bruni : ‘She is the kind of minx who might sleep with your husband simply to annoy you, or to amuse herself, or because she was bored. Worse, the husband would then be in some kind of desperate erotic thrall for all eternity . . .’

There's sumptuously illustrated typographical wallow over on the irresistible I love typography , which I insist that everyone visits right this minute, it's so good.

A previous Sunday Type post on ILT had alerted me to Holli Conger’s Type Junkie photos on Flickr. Holli’s typography photos can be purchased on Etsy .

And while wandering around inside the box of delights that is Etsy, here's GemmaBeads' quirky jewellery, which recycles old typewriter keys . Creates the same kind of ambiance as the work of Clare Hillerby, I feel - and equally perfect for people exactly like me (or similar). Santa please note.

It was a predominantly dull, grey (and occasionally white) old March, here in the UK, so how uplifting to the spirits to enjoy these vibrant images of Holi (or Phagwa), the festival of colour that takes place in March every year in India and Nepal, over on COLOURlovers (a great place to lose oneself for many happy hours, whether or not you can actually spare the time).

Finally, if you didn't catch this BBC iPlayer trailer on 1st April, you still have a few more days to view it.

Well that’s more than enough to be going on with. I’m off to tackle the daunting results of having washed and dried ten loads of family laundry without having subsequently folded or sorted – let alone ironed (as if . . .) – a single crumpled item of it. Ho hum.

Although I won’t manage to get online, I am taking a creaky old laptop with me, so hope to have some time to tap in a few musings on recent good reads – among them Waterloo Sunset, Talk to the Hand, After You’d Gone , The Memory Box and the novel that’s currently taking the bookblogosphere by storm, Daphne.

Freelancers don't just do it for love

Here's a clip that's been doing the rounds in freelance circles. I discovered it courtesy of the Wordsmith (thanks, Wordsmith), since when I have noticed it appearing all over the place on the blogs of others who work at the freelance coalface in the arts/media/publishing.

Whether you're an editor whose clients make their low budget your problem rather than theirs ('sorry, we can't pay you more than £[derisory sum x] to do this, so take it or leave it but if you leave it we'll sulk and you'll never get any work from us again'); or a photographer whose image is selected for publication in a large-circulation national newspaper/magazine ('sorry we don't actually pay for photos, but you'll get a credit'); or a journalist who's asked to research and write a piece for peanuts because if you don't, then someone whose only goal is seeing their name in print will do it for nothing instead; or an artist who's offered twenty quid for an illustration that's taken days to create; or indeed anyone struggling to earn a living through their art, whose creative talent is completely undervalued or taken for granted or assumed to be available for nothing by those who bask in the certainty of a regular pay-cheque (I'm just setting the tone here, you understand, and the tone is full-blown RANT!) . . .

. . . then you're not alone. And this is for you . . .

One of those days

Have you ever spent six hours working on a large Word document which has then crashed and when you try to re-open the file . . . you can't? This is the sort of day I've been having. It was the sort of day I had yesterday, too, and the day before that was the day I woke at 6 to hear that Alan Johnston had been released and I had sincerely meant to record here exactly how I felt about that, and what it told us about the immense value and importance of 'real' journalism in this world. Above all, my awed admiration for this gaunt, pale, blinking man, as he emerged into the maelstrom surrounding his release - his dignity, the almost effortless way in which he straight away began to offer a balanced, articulate, self-effacing account of his captivity, his good humour, his touching insistence on an immediate haircut (he was right - he looked gorgeous afterwards!). What a guy. The phrase 'consummate professionalism' has been ubiquitously applied, but, really, it can't be bettered. And now, at his insistence, attention is being drawn to the other 'forgotten' western hostages in the middle-east. May he enjoy a long, well-deserved and peaceful period of unwinding in Lochgoilhead. With cups of tea whenever he likes.

Oh, anyway, I finally managed to open the file in some notepad-y application or other, so I recovered the data and will only have to spend an hour re-formatting everything, rather than six hours re-writing it. Phew. No thanks whatever to Microsoft's impenetrably badly indexed online 'help' pages - worse than useless.

Just been listening to some of my favourite guitar music, played by my very favourite guitarist in all the world. And looking at some fabulous photographs by one of my favourite photographers. With a very large mug of tea.

[Rant of the day: it is extremely dangerous to take photographs while driving. Even on the inside lane. You know who you are. (But you won't for much longer if you carry on like that.)]