Giant Squid Creations

Last week my ears were firmly up against the wall taking in as much of ABC Classic FM's Classic 100 countdown as possible. The theme this year was nominally the 20th century but in practice it was anything from 1900 to today. For me the countdown was a culmination of a process of discovery; not that the journey is by any means finished it's just not so firmly focussed on one time period any more. Going into the voting I had some absolute favourites, but I wanted to find out more about what my options were. It wasn't all that long ago I put aside the idea of all classical music coming from a bygone era and all composers being roughly contemporary. So finding out what happened in the last hundred or so years was really interesting. I won't bore you with all the details but classical music is more than you might think and worth trying out. I was lucky and grew up with it, but if you haven't given it much of a chance I encourage you to. The countdown itself raised ...

I figure it's about time I started this blog and what better place to start it than the time I met Neil Gaiman ? Of course, by meet I mean I handed him a book and he signed it and handed it back, but there was a moment and it deserves a blog. First some back story. Six months before this fated meeting I'd barely heard of the man. I knew the name, I knew he was an author and someone at uni once told me I should read something he wrote. That was about it. Similarly, I'd heard of the Dresden Dolls and knew Coin-Operated Boy, but Amanda Palmer was a mystery to me. Then my wife, who at that stage was my fiancee and already a big fan of Amanda Palmer, bought and read Neverwhere because someone had told her she should. She wasn't even halfway through when she told me I had to read to it too. So of course I did; six months later I'd read it and American Gods and was collecting his other books as quickly as I could. This stuff was gold, solid gold. So, when Amanda Palm...