Lesbian Bastard Heroes and Other Stories.

I have had an eventful week, to put it mildly. A week ago I was decorating a village hall, carrying chairs and checking camera angles for my friends' wedding in an idyllic English village in the heart of Brexit country. My main job was photographer, but I'm now an expert at bunting hanging, guest corralling and taxi-marshalling. The happy couple were beautiful, the rector was organised and thoughtful (even this atheist appreciated her sermon) and the draught porter was Murphy's. Oh, and I came home with a sack of cheese left over from the reception, which was a bit of a result.

I could have done with a couple of days' rest after that, but the pre-term panic is well and truly ON! Rather than write lectures (including the MA module on Ballard I've suddenly inherited), I've been wrestling with a new VLE and trying – after six months of work, to get the powers that be to give students the correct course guides so that they actually know what they're meant to be studying in two weeks' time. We've had a day-conference on 'widening excellence', a 'roadshow' from the VC which consists of buttered words and sharp steel, and before we even start inducting the new students there's a staff conference and graduation to look forward to. On the plus side, the department has a new Graduate Teaching Assistant. Having taken a First Class degree this year, she's getting used to seeing what her former teachers are like behind the curtain. Only one keyboard has been punched to death in her presence this week (not by me, I hasten to add).

The other highlight of the week was tearing a calf muscle while fencing. My first injury in almost 25 years: it's painful, and I can only hobble about. Given I commute by bicycle, it's making life rather difficult. Age is a terrible leveller, my children.

It's not all drudgery. I'm enjoying catching up on all the texts I'm teaching this year (including lots of Shakespeare, Milton, Marlowe, Doctorow, Eggers, Atwood, Valerie Solanas, Winterson – in the course of which I found Esther Saxey's journal article with the superb title 'Lesbian Bastard Heroes' – Gerard Winstanley, Ballard, Monica Ali, Jackie Kay, Jilly Cooper, Gil Scott-Heron) and I have an interesting PhD to examine in early November. Oh, and I'm compering an interesting event at the Birmingham Literature Festival on working-class writing, including Catherine O'Flynn, one of my favourite novelists. I'm just not sure when my research is going to get done. I'm still working on my politicians' novels project, but the discovery that Robert Kilroy-Silk has produced three of them has rather taken the pleasure out of it. It just struck me that he's exactly the kind of politico who thinks he has talents in every field, so I looked him up on WorldCat and there he is: a mid-eighties novel called The Ceremony of Innocence which doesn't sound entirely savoury, and three more recent e-books which sounded even worse than Peter Hain's, Norman Tebbit's and Boris Johnson's output (and having read all of them, I promise that's very, very bad indeed).

One's a Condition-of-England one that attacks 'political correctness' and another one makes the case for father-daughter incest. If you don't know who RKS is, or what he's like, this Guardian article tells you far, far more than you might ever need to know.

Eye-poppingly unsavoury novels…Kilroy-Silk is beholden to no one as he writes novels that he self-publishes on Amazon's Kindle. He's published three since the spring and each seethes with rage at political correctness in modern British society – with their unsavoury racism, glum sexist stereotypes, borderline homophobic jibes and digs against Islam, they reek of an outsider judging a world he doesn't want to understand… 

Closure ends (spoiler alert!) with the wretched stereotype of an obese lesbian social worker being murdered by a vengeful father who leaves her strangled corpse tied up amid dildos to make it look like a perverted autoerotic asphyxiation. After, of course, having arranged that the children have been kidnapped from their adoptive parents and whisked away to Cyprus.

Which rather takes us back to 'Lesbian bastard heroes' I suppose. Anyway, welcome to my world. Enjoy your weekend.