Over Christmas, tango was cancelled again. Milongas and practicas had started up again in autumn. The organisers were very careful to follow all the guidelines, which, it must be said, are highly changeable, not always clear and open to interpretation by the entitled. Tango is an intimate dance, unless you’re…

Being a somewhat organised person, I start each year with a Strategic Planning Document, aka New Year’s resolutions. Obviously, this is a joke at my own expense because no normal person has a Strategic Planning Document. It also reflects my brief time as a long-ago employee of a large government…

Thank god for my day job. Early last year, one of my unpublished novels won a first-chapter competition. The main prize was editorial advice and the possibility of being introduced to agents. As any unpublished writer knows, trying to get the attention of an agent is like a shipwreck survivor…

I spent two days last week in hell. I don’t know if Hieronymus Bosch’s complex and lurid depictions of hell  include a person with their head in a bucket while being variously tormented by a fish-headed demon, but for me, hell is nausea. I’d never had labyrinthitis before. The sudden…