🔥The 9th Round of Easy Loan, Earn $40 Reward is in progress❗️ ⏰ Promotion Period: January 15th - Feburary 15th, 2025 👉 Register now and check more details at gate.io/campaigns/358

Happy August, everyone, from the wise plinths of Corstorphine Hill.

Congrats to William Sutcliffe, winner of Calderdale Children's Book of the Year 2022. Thanks Brian Conaghan William Sutcliffe Phil Earle & Ben Bailey Smith for your support & involvement, a fantastic shortlist & an inspiring opportunity for children @KidsBloombury Andersen Press

4pm today - available as a pay-what-you-can live stream (link in the thread below). If you're interested in Vashti Bunyan, 60s counterculture, why you'd spend two years walking to Skye with a horse and cart or leave a 35-year gap between albums, this is the event for you.

As a summer project I’ve inched through “The Piano: A History in 100 Pieces” by Susan Tomes one piece per day, reading then listening. It’s been a wonderful education in both history and attentive listening. Hugely recommended for all piano-lovers. open.spotify.com/playlist/3HeMx…

This is a magnificent book. If you are in middle life, becoming aware that the time you have left is finite, and are trying to make thoughtful choices about how to use it, this is a brilliant guide to that process. Thank you, Oliver Burkeman.

A paragraph from Hilary Mantel's Reith lectures (2017). Especially apt for lawyers among others. RIP 🙏🏽

Really enjoyable event last night interviewing the peerless @jonathancoe. If you want to understand the roots of the UK’s collective nervous breakdown, I can’t recommend “Bournville” highly enough.

Effective thinking isn’t about ‘working hard’ in any brute or rote sense. It is about learning to spot, defend, nurture and grow our fleeting, tentative periods of insight. (Henri Matisse, Back to the Open Window, 1922)

As our government tries to distract us from their failures by fomenting hatred against refugees, a reminder that political rhetoric doesn’t have to be this way. This is the poem that was cast in bronze on the Statue of Liberty in 1903.

This is a very interesting article on why AI is at the heart of the WGA Writers' Strike. open.substack.com/pub/colehaddon…

I am planning to start an online therapy group for writers and other artists: a sympathetic and compassionate place to share the weight of the creative struggle. It will be weekly, £25 per session, day/time TBC. Please contact me via website if interested or curious.

My online therapy group for writers and other creatives is starting next month. Please share this with anyone you know who might be interested. Writing is a lonely business, involving struggles that are hard to communicate. This group will provide support, understanding and help.

My weekly online therapy group is a place for writers to talk frankly, and in confidence, with other people who share an understanding of the stresses and challenges that come with the life of a writer. Two spaces are now available - do get in touch if you're interested.