Good morning Liverpool and
let me tell you I'm agog with anticipation over the latest edition of The Reader Magazine published by the English Department of the University of Liverpool and my copy is in the post.
Number 29 harbours some amazing talent and then me.
There's Mark Rylance the Shakesperean actor, Gabriel Josipovici, Howard Jacobson, Jane Davis, Joanna Trollope, lots about Joseph Conrad ...gasp A.S.Byatt and loads more besides...and then, well then on page ninety and lurking between Hayes and Jacobson in the List of Contributors there seems to be me.
I had great fun writing a piece on my passion for reading groups of all descriptions, postal, online, face-to-face, and of course the best of them all, with apologies to all the others, The Endsleigh Salon.
There was a problem with my photo which kept coming out blurry apparently and, though blurry is probably safer for the nation, Phil Davis eventually persuaded me to submit something useable. You can read Phil's editorial here and sense the excitement mounting around Liverpool as the 2008 Capital of Culture. The Reader will be hosting a Literary Festival in November which is going in my diary right now.
I'm hoping to take the blog out and about to a few literary festivals this year, the first was supposed to be Abingdon yesterday by kind invitation of Mark and Nicky at Mostly Books and sadly I was unable to go. I've had an unfortunate week of annual-leave-wrecking virus which like most viruses heads for your Achilles heel, in my case my Achilles neck, and then was knocked right off my perch by some new prescription painkillers. I have the constitution of an elf when it comes to drugs, being prescribed sufficient for an elephant was a recipe for disaster.
If anyone needs to take out a stray elephant just ask me for details.
However I think I owe it to my Liverpudlian inheritance to be there in this special year and what a great opportunity to explore all those places I grew up hearing about and was taken too but barely remember, Elswick Street where my mum was born, Matthew Arnold where she went to school, Sefton Park, the Liver Buildings. I may have been born in Devon and then grew up in London but by crikey a bit of our home was always Liverpool and the Mersey.
Sunday Salon reading later I expect.


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