roblog

MYMZK

2012-01-28T15:56:00.003-08:00

In around February 2010, I started looking into a project to produce a bespoke, curated, not-for-profit music website. It would be written well, in an accessible manner. Ideally I'd be interviewing people who were not making a lot of money from their work, and help promote them along the way.

I commissioned Andy Cole at EnterExit to come up with the design concept, something clean, simple and modern, with Imran Younis then building it in code from scratch. I update and manipulate the HTML with new material in Dreamweaver CS5.5, which helps keep the site as unique as I possibly can. Assuming you've not just left it, you can see the results here.

The site is fully licensed via the Performing Rights Society (PRS). Delphine Seddon at Statham, Gill and Davies has provided legal advice while Ian Kynnersley and Luke Razzell at Elastik Mobile have conceptualised and built an iPhone app from scratch. This and an email template have been designed along Andy's guidelines, and will follow the content. The app, once operational, will allow the download of new music along with clean, easy-to-read interviews, which ideally communicate a sense of the acts' local venues and interests.

To help with writing, I've enlisted the help of various talented journalism students - whose enthusiasm is gratefully appreciated - studying on the City University journalism courses. We're looking to hear from anyone who wants to get involved, who would be interested in being spoken to, written about, or would like to write themselves. I'm happy to edit students' work, or provide feedback where needed.

Feel free to write to me here if any of that applies. If you're still not bored, some more information about me is on my website, or you can follow me on Twitter here.

2012-01-09T00:43:00.000-08:00

So I've re-read a couple of novels from last year, seeing how they work. Read The Ask, Fiesta, The Road, alongside The Turn of the Screw, now working my way through Bleak House, hopefully moving on to the Tomalin biography afterwards, and Scott Fitzgerald's stories. Quite fancy a bit of Peter Ackroyd at some point. I re-wrote a short story about the Pamplona, well in the genre fiction zone, now working on a couple of other pieces of writing. I prepared, and then unprepared, an application for the Columbia MFA, with the feeling that I need to get better.

Trying to work along the lines of this Gary Lutz piece in The Believer on prose style. A feat in itself.

Work-wise, have had commissions from The Guardian, Esquire UK, and am helping The New York Times journalist Graham Bowley research a book. I've been commissioned to write a catalogue for Rivington Street's RED gallery, and am likely to be doing quite a lot of freelance PR for various clients. Am excited about focusing on fiction, and MYMZK (see above).

2011-12-10T11:31:00.000-08:00

These are some of my final news stories at The Independent before I went freelance at the beginning of December (since then, I have been commissioned by Esquire, am working on MYMZK and am pursuing new opportunities).

*Story off back of leaked correspondence between Leonardo owner and Dr Nicholas Penny, director of the National Gallery, ahead of the gallery's major show;

*Call of Duty 3 approved by censors (followed by The Daily Mail);

*Shane Meadows lined up for Stone Roses film (followed by The Guardian, The Sun, NME, Metro, among others)

*Did Van Gogh die in unfortunate brush with fate (first journalist in the world to report; story subsequently published by hundreds of international media);

*Child visitors plummet to major museums;

*The Wallingers that were too wacky, even for him.

2011-08-07T14:02:00.001-07:00

Recent stories (I am just going to include here those which I wrote about first)

*Turkey demands return of its "Elgin Marble" (followed by CNN)

*Sue Tilley moves out of Soho (followed on page three, The Evening Standard)

*Tate staff complain of bullying (followed by The Evening Standard)
*Ford Madox Brown piece discovered (followed by BBC, Reuters, The LA Times, The Guardian)

*JG Ballard's house for sale (followed by The Guardian, The Evening Standard & BBC)
*Poetry Society slash funding (followed by The Guardian & BBC)
*Michelangelo discovered at Oxford college (followed by Huffington Post, BBC, and then a lot of international media)
*Short story campaign (part of rolling stories followed by The Guardian)
*Venice censorship (followed by The Daily Telegraph)

Have also been invited to become a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

2011-04-10T09:38:00.000-07:00

Some key stories so far this year (listed here so I don't forget).

*Covering the Brits, Baftas and Oliviers;

*Nationwide Arts Council cuts.

*Story about Dennis Hopper's art being pulled (reported ahead of/followed by LA Times, FT, NY Daily News);

*Quotes calling for Ai Weiwei's release (quotes used by The Guardian, Channel 4, and Der Spiegel);

*Story on new choreography in ballet (followed by The Telegraph);

*Interviews with Sir Nicholas Penny; Lenny Henry and Greg Dyke.

*Story on Yuri Gagarin statue (followed by Mail; later reported by The Guardian, The Mirror, BBC);

*Nice exclusives on CS Lewis, Kew, Pertwee, Anderson & Gold; Luminaire piece from a while ago, later cropping up in The Guardian.

2010-12-28T15:16:00.001-08:00

Been a busy first month or two as arts correspondent. I guess highlights would be:

*Jack Thorne's play at the National;

*An interview with Mat Collishaw;

*Nigerian protests forcing cancellation of a Sotheby's auction (followed by The New York Times and the BBC);

*An interview with James Rhodes;

*Coverage of protests at the Turner Prize;

*Patrick Stewart's complaints about Broadway (followed by The Daily Express)

*Behind the scenes on Peter and the Wolf at the ROH, whose director, Tony Hall, I also interviewed;

*The suspension of the Royal Opera House's move North;

*A page three on Bob Marley;

*A splash on Joanna Yeates.

2010-10-24T10:42:00.000-07:00

So I spent last week at Arvon centre the Hurst, in Shropshire, on a short story course. I'd really recommend going on something like this if you're interested in writing; the access you get to the tutors is excellent.

You're essentially there for four days. We had four three-hour workshops, two one-on-one tutorials (with Adam Thorpe and Olive Senior) and then readings in the evenings. Di Speirs, one of Radio 4's senior fiction producers, and the person instrumental in founding the BBC's famous short story award, also came down to answer questions.

I've also just been appointed The Independent's arts reporter/correspondent (not sure on the title as yet), so I'm going to be the point of contact for arts news at the newspaper for the forseeable. It's exciting, because we're also launching a new title aimed at young/lapsed newspaper readers imminently.

Here's my review of Geoff Dyer's essays, a book I couldn't recommend highly enough.

2010-10-11T10:51:00.000-07:00

Finished "The Interpretation of Dreams" and this book on Riker's Island which was more interesting than I had initially reckoned, as well as picking through Adam Thorpe's short stories, Ballard's short stories, and Raymond Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" mainly because he was name-dropped by Yannis Philippakis in this month's Q. Also enjoying Geoff Dyer's essays. The following, a Jung quotation, stood out, among others, in Dyer's piece on "Tender is the Night".

"The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing...He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths...The only meaningful life...is...a life that strives for the individual realisation - absolute and unconditional - of its own peculiar law...To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his own being...he has failed to realise his life's meaning."

Wrote some things on Nick Cave, animal pyschology and a couple of historical documentaries.

2010-09-12T14:42:00.000-07:00

Wrote a piece on some photographs accompanying "Restrepo", a forthcoming war film directed by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger. Also pitched and wrote page three of the paper on Alasdhair Willis.

Had a couple of weeks off. Read Gary Shteyngart's "Super Sad True Love Story"; "Portnoy's Complaint", "Cloud Atlas" (jaw-dropping); a book of Iain M Banks short stories, "City and the City", Tom McCarthy's "Remainder" and Michael Kahn's "Basic Freud" (the excerpts below are from elsewhere). Wandered to Fulham library and now very much want to read this.

2010-08-30T13:36:00.001-07:00

1. W.H. Auden:

"Bound to ourselves for life

We must learn to put up with each other."

2. K.F. Burdach via Freud:

"Dream is a bulwark against the regularity and ordinariness of life, a period of free rest and recreation for the chained imagination in which it tosses all the images of life into confusion and interrupts the steady seriousness of the waking person with a joyous childhood game; without dreams we should certainly age faster, so dream, even if not directly bestowed from above, may still be seen as a precious duty, a congenial companion on our pilgrimage to the grave."

3. Then Auden on Freud (not the simpering eulogy I was hoping for):

"...but he would have us remember most of all
to be enthusiastic over the night,
not only for the sense of wonder
it alone has to offer, but also

because it needs our love. With large sad eyes
its delectable creatures look up and beg
us dumbly to ask them to follow:
they are exiles who long for the future..."

"Stories" 2010

2010-08-29T10:46:00.000-07:00

A short story by Michael Moorcock.

"We didn't want to write what we called Englit-fic: the styles and themes of which came out of universities in sad imitation of the great modernists. We wanted to write something that had the vitality of good commercial fiction and the subtle ambition of good literary fiction, reflecting the sensibilities and events of our times: stuff that would get us high with the sense of engagement of Proust or Faulkner but with the disciplined vitality of genre fiction pulsing from every page.

A few of us talked about a 'two-way street' to reunite junk, middlebrow and highbrow fiction. Some people out there had to be as frustrated as us, dissatisfied by pretty much everything on offer, literary or commercial. For ages people had discussed the 'two cultures'. We might just be the guys to unite them: writing for a reader who knew a bit about poetry, painting and physics, enjoyed Gerald Kersh, Elizabeth Bowen and Mervyn Peake, merging realism with grotesquerie and doing it elegantly, eloquently."

There's a repeat of the old maxim in here - something once relayed from Kubrick to Stephen King during their only pre-production phone call regarding "The Shining" - about the essential optimism of ghost stories.

I pitched and wrote a nice piece for our Saturday magazine about the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Finished "Labyrinths", and Michael Swanwick's "The Dragons of Babel" (on the evidence of this he's the Armistead Maupin of the fantasy genre) reading "The Interpretation of Dreams."

"On becoming a novelist" (1983)

2010-08-20T14:24:00.000-07:00

Came home from work and read this book, considered a classic, by novelist John Gardner, who once taught Carver. A couple of passages really stood out for me. If I were to choose one of them, it would be this (the other one was about choosing to study science over literature, which he had some interesting thoughts on).

"Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency towards churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know to be true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness; impulsiveness and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. Not all writers have exactly these same virtues, of course. Occasionally one finds one who is not abnormally improvident."

"Boxer, Beetle"

2010-08-08T10:45:00.001-07:00

Just finished this excellent book; reminiscent of Michael Chabon, I think, as well as Twelve Bar Blues (here's my review). I didn't much like any of the characters though their psychology was brilliantly rendered; eugenicist as repressed homosexual; bruiser who doesn't pay much attention to such things; free will versus determinism and all that jazz. Two digressions (language and architecture) as well as flitting between two times. I want to trace what came from where; the ideas are dazzling, and inspiring. Also completed Stephen King's On Writing, working my way through SF periodicals (or trying to, I'm guessing a lot of them are well past their golden age). Completed a couple of half ideas, Guardian Angela and Bobby Rodriguez which I guess are "flash fiction"; I don't have the heart to go back and fill them out. Wrote another quick story called "Carver beats the devil".

To read....

2010-08-05T14:55:00.000-07:00

So I've been on a bit of an Amazon spree recently and I thought I'd upload this photo because I'm feeling slightly smug about it. I've got two weeks off coming up and I want to plough through this lot; have three pre-orders waiting in the wings and three more I'd like to read (including something by Jon Stone who I saw recently, but anyway). I think I should make headway with this lot first.

Oceans, The Deep, Coolth

2010-08-04T14:20:00.000-07:00

A random week, but interesting. Had pieces published on Gwyn Prins' piece on A/C from the 1990s, one of the best papers I've read in ages; something on oceanography, again based on a scientific work which was as good as anything I've read, and a nice TV review.

Read The Big Sleep, some literature for something else I'm working on, finally London Orbital, (he loves the words "limonal", "plash", and "Italianate"); an ex-girlfriend's name cropped up in the acknowledgments, which was scary) and have started Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio's "Stories", within which the Joyce Carol Oates vignette blew my mind. A really tight, imaginative, visually clever narrative which was over in 15 pages. Not sure what I think of the Sinclair book, really, there's no real depth to it which is fair enough considering the ground he covers, but it's a very dense proposition. I guess it'll grow.

Harold Chapman

2010-07-20T14:06:00.001-07:00

One of those rare pieces, speaking to an artist at the end of their career, which is really quite moving (the last time I think I felt this, really, was when meeting Liv Ullman at Karlovy Vary in 2005). Harold Chapman photographed all the Beats in Paris. I went to his home in Kent and spent a lovely couple of hours with him. His wife was taking photos silently throughout. The quote that really blew me away was this:

"I look back at those days in Paris as the happiest in my life. I discovered you could live frugally with very little and it didn't affect whether or not you were happy. All the worries people have about the rent, or the income tax, or insurance, had gone. Youth, of course, sees the world in different eyes. I am old, I can't see it the way they see it. But there are ways of existing quite cheaply."

I was really moved by that, for some reason. He has a lovely voice; I'd have loved to have uploaded an audio track of the interview. Anyway, as soon as he'd said that, my mouth dropped open. I finished the interview, pressed stop on the dictaphone. I looked up, and then his wife's camera just went "click", and she smiled. This is what she took:

I finally got around to reading my friend Jennie's excellent Costa-nominated novel, Inside the Whale, and Mr Satoshi by Jonathan Lee, which is brilliantly-well written. Am now reading Of Men and Monsters, a 1960s science-fiction book, and quickly worked through Laura Barton's first book, which is scarily-well written.

London lit mags

2010-07-15T15:53:00.000-07:00

I wrote a piece on new London literary mags, vastly helped out by Pen Pusher's editor Anna Goodall, who came into the office and revealed herself to be a brilliantly cool and intelligent character. Have been going to a few of the salons in recent weeks and they're always a lot of fun.

I wrote a work blog about some of the short stories I've been enjoying recently and had some interesting suggestions.

Glastonbury 2010

2010-07-15T15:44:00.000-07:00

Was in two minds about going to cover this, but I was glad that I went. I started off with a preview, then did coverage of the first night, Gorillaz's performance then a final night review, and finally an arts spread which I wrote between 7pm and 1am on Sunday night. We got caught in traffic on the way back; but I hope they let me do it again. I needed to blow of steam on Saturday night, and didn't go to bed, which made the following day quite challenging. I met some nice people who I'm still in contact with (including Vashti, whose brothers are Tom Baxter and Charlie Winston; she's an amazing character).

Bridge update

2010-06-07T15:19:00.000-07:00

13/06/10 update. Have re-written The Bridge, trying to simplify it. Am reading the McKee book, China Mieville, and a couple of novels by people of around my age. Just finished short story collections by BEE, Jay McInerney, Raymond Carver. Kazuo Ishiguro's "A Family Supper" is quite nice.

Monarchy/anonymous bands

2010-05-13T21:46:00.000-07:00

Interviewed Monarchy, who I've been obsessed with for about six months, then broadened the piece out to anonymous musicians in general. Went to Hackney to interview them via a laptop link-up; I really liked them, they seemed bizarrely human. I was glad they'd made the effort.

Also got to interview Patrick Neate, something of a hero, over the phone. It was nice of him to take the call because I think his wife was just about to have a baby. We interviewed him for my student paper for the first issue of which I was editor many moons ago, just as he was breaking through. I've finished The Pregnant Widow, re-read Lolita, felt obliged to read the first two Stieg Larsson books but I think I'm going to stop persevering with things I'm not really enjoying. On the other hand, Wells Tower's short story collection is ace.

Short stories #2

2010-05-09T07:38:00.000-07:00

Spent a couple of weeks writing some other stories. I went for a run on Friday night and wrote Lost Cosmonaut afterwards. The relief of having got something done was weirdly moving.

The story is loosely based on the last minutes of Vladimir Komarov, the first man to die in space. I'd picked through a couple of books on it at the British Library - Epic Rivalry, and Fallen Astronauts (which possibly has the best subtitle in history), both of which are really intriguing.

Silver Tree is told from the perspective of a park keeper who is suddenly confronted with a silver tree that makes everyone who climbs it want to jump out.

Then there was Sky Island which I'm a fan of, told from the POV of an Ivy League undergraduate who kills someone while at a party held by a billionaire on a floating venue in the sky. Been loose with the details because I reckon the character wouldn't go into too many details. I got the idea for that on the flight back.

We All Need Space was the story of an old man going mad at the bottom of his garden; he's an amateur radio operator who thinks he's detected an astronaut's heartbeat (this was a first draft of Lost Cosmonaut which I kind of stuck with). Anyway, I'm going to leave these here until I figure out what I want to do with them. My favourites are probably Sky Island, Lost Cosmonaut, Silver Tree and We All Need Space, in that order.

Alan Campbell, who is represented by Mic Cheetham - and as well as being a very talented writer he was one of the programmers on the computer game "Vice City" - read a couple and said some very promising things, which I really appreciated.

22/05. I've been reading Interzone, F&SF, Pen Pusher, Litro and Ambit. William Boyd.

Rebuilding Haiti

2010-04-19T01:09:00.001-07:00

Did a piece on rebuilding Haiti for the last ever cover of the Indy's features supplement. It took a couple of re-writes, mostly because I felt like comparing Haiti's reconstruction to historical examples was kind of invalid, given the uniqueness of its situation. When we eventually published it, I could see where they were coming from, even if I didn't entirely agree with it.

Ellie Goulding

2010-03-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

Hung around with her for a bit in Glasgow for the cover of our Saturday magazine. She was really down to earth. On Saturday night she invited me backstage but I was kind of worn out by then and was trying to text The Boy Who Trapped The Sun, but didn't manage to hook up with him either. But it was a fun day; her tour manager Jamie was a really great guy.

NYPC

2010-03-24T16:19:00.000-07:00

Interviewed the band in their North London studio. I was a bit nervous (since I fell in love with their first album) but they were very brilliant and massively accommodating. Apparently a couple of the girls changed outfits a couple of times during the shoot, much to our photographer's amusement. That said, they look great.

Hot Chip

2010-03-13T07:10:00.000-08:00

Reviewed Hot Chip playing in Brixton. Wouldn't normally post a review but it blew me away. Went around to my good friend Dan's afterwards who I later heard had a rather bizarre night which I was glad I'd bowed out of early.

Losing on all fronts

2010-02-06T03:16:00.000-08:00

Here's something I wrote for my work blog (which I don't normally link to, for some reason) about a paper published last year. It delves into the psychological effects of political attacks and I thought it was really interesting.

Delphic

2010-01-30T09:18:00.000-08:00

Reviewed them at The Garage then interviewed them in Brighton. I didn't have long, but they were gracious, and funny.

Short stories

2010-01-13T12:12:00.000-08:00

I took a week off work to write and have uploaded three short stories on to a separate blog which I'm hoping to update as regularly as I can. They kind of operate as writing exercises as well. The first is called "The Bridge"; it's about two kids who walk down to the marsh with their granddad. The other two I've since deleted, I don't think they're strong enough. (Kate le Vann kindly read all three for me). I'm also uploading them to Edit Red which seems like a valuable resource. "Patient" was kindly published by the guys at Short Story Library.

3/4/10 update: Inexplicably, Patient at Shortbread seems to be high up the Google rankings with almost 100 hits, which I suppose is marginally less painful than a kick in the balls.

KOC

2010-01-07T17:33:00.000-08:00

They finally published my Kings of Convenience interview, something I'm unusually proud of. There's a link at the bottom to the full transcript, which is well worth a look, I think. They're very interesting people.

Aids denialism

2009-12-02T14:59:00.001-08:00

Wrote a piece for the paper about UK Aids denialism for World Aids Day. John Moore, a professor of microbiology at Cornell University, said in the now-deleted comments that the article "could save lives".

Olaf Breuning

2009-11-06T07:55:00.000-08:00

Here's an interview with Olaf Breuning which I did for Wonderland about a year ago which I forgot to upload. Interesting guy.

http://www.wonderlandmagazine.com/features/the_breuning_version/

Fab40: Germany

2009-11-06T07:51:00.000-08:00

Written a few tiny things for the November issue of Wallpaper* about things you can see in Germany.

Le Mazagan

2009-11-06T07:41:00.001-08:00

Just got back from the Mazagan, Sol Kerzner's latest hotel, in Morocco. It's 5*, though about an hour's drive from Casablanca, so it's quite isolated. There was a big bash to open it; Lindsay Lohan was there. The Mirror said she kissed Gerard Butler, though as far as I could tell, she was with her boyfriend, a guy called Petey, the whole time.

Here's the review.

Philippe Starck

2009-10-18T16:21:00.001-07:00

Interviewed him at the Sanderson, which he designed. He's not happy with his television series.

Kings of Convenience

2009-09-29T16:18:00.000-07:00

Just got back from Norway; met Erlend Øye yesterday for dinner but didn't go on; then walked around with his bandmate, Eirek Glambek Bøe at the top of this mountain before walking to his flat for a nice cup of tea and then on to lunch. They were overworked but really nice. And am sure I saw the lead singer of Casiokids walking through central Bergen...

I later reviewed their gig at the Barbican.

AIR

2009-09-19T11:22:00.001-07:00

Interview with AIR up after a day trip to their studio in Paris; amazing pics by Eva Vermandel (see her work at evavirmandel.com). It was on my birthday. I came back and had a party in London, jumped in a swimming pool, had a fight with a cab driver and lost my phone. Interesting day.

Emperor Machine.

2009-08-23T17:20:00.000-07:00

Glastonbury

2009-06-28T16:31:00.000-07:00

A strange, emotional week, culminating with Blur's set at the Somerset festival. Was offered the chance to cover the festival for our Sunday newspaper. I'd never been before so left work at 2pm on Friday and drove there, very fast down the motorway (who knew a Skoda could get to 90). Neil Young was incredible; I sadly had to watch Blur on telly. After they finished, I felt like crying.

Phoenix

2009-06-12T05:57:00.001-07:00

Interview with @wearephoenix Thomas Mars from LA and Deck D'Arcy via phone. Mars's gig was cancelled after he had a throat infection.

Joe Goddard/Hot Chip

2009-05-29T05:57:00.000-07:00

Spoke to Joe Goddard from @hot_chip on the phone briefly about what they're up to. The man's a gent. The interview also ran on Drowned in Sound (@DrownedinSound).

House of God

2009-05-29T05:56:00.000-07:00

A great short film made by a couple of my friends. YouTube have nixed the Talking Heads track so hopefully this will work a little better.

House of God from Rob Sharp on Vimeo.

Frankmusik

2009-05-15T01:12:00.000-07:00

Interviewed Vincent Frank a.k.a. @Frankmusik.

Thatcher

2009-04-30T15:26:00.000-07:00

Just interviewed lots of people -- guitarist from The Specials, former Falklands hostage, Tim Bell, John Lloyd, Poll Tax rioter -- to mark 30 years since Maggie.

Crofting

2009-04-02T02:51:00.001-07:00

Spent a day on the magnificent Isle of Skye last month; was very lucky with the weather. Wrote something about Scotland's beleaguered crofting community.

Wael Daya

2009-03-14T18:08:00.001-07:00

Wael Daya kindly let me spend time with him to film some quick things. Have uploaded them to YouTube.

Jimmy Johnson

2009-01-28T13:52:00.000-08:00

Interviewed Jimmy Johnson, head of a notorious travelling family behind the country's biggest ever burglary, via a contact who used to work for Scotland Yard. I spent around three of four months meeting with him in my own time, trying to get to know him. I guess I'm proud because it was during the height of the redundancy period at The Independent and we were all being rated out of five for our performance (God knows if it had any impact).

The piece gazumped a BBC documentary that aired the evening after the article was published. You can read it here.

Gaza

2008-11-12T16:47:00.000-08:00

I'd been following the Free Gaza movement (who later would become famous in horrific circumstances) with some interest and this opportunity came up at the last minute. I was lucky enough to be given holiday at short notice. I went to Larnaca and got a boat to Gaza, where we met the head of Hamas - with whom I was offered a one-off interview - who has not been heard of since. I guess I was hoping for a spread but was told that they were running a picture of Remembrance Sunday instead. I guess it was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. But I'm glad that the online news story was run (you can read it here), and I met some incredible people. There are those who continually risk their lives for what they believe in; it was a once-in-a-lifetime glimpse into their lives.

The very bad picture of me above shows the boat about to set off on its return journey; Haniyeh is just left of the pole in the middle bottom.

4Talent

2008-11-01T06:52:00.000-07:00

Got shortlisted in the journalism category.

Andy Kershaw

2008-09-07T15:03:00.000-07:00

Kershaw interview sold to the Mail by Indy. He claimed to be on the run from the police when I met him.

Peter Blake

2008-05-31T17:57:00.000-07:00

Visit to Peter Blake's in West London.

Richard Rogers

2008-04-23T16:03:00.000-07:00

Here's an interview I did with Rogers and his son, Abe, pegged to an exhibition they were curating at London's Design Museum.

Duffy

2008-02-23T17:51:00.000-08:00

Interviewed Duffy for the cover feature of our Saturday magazine.