Tricksy postmodernist git

Cynical Ben has spent most of the last week setting up a variety of blogs under pseudonyms. It now appears that they are all part of a new genre of writing - a novel of sorts consisting of characters' telling their parts of the story on their own blogs. He's provided a central site from which you can access the various facets.

I'm seriously impressed - the concept is fascinating, the characterisation's good, and it makes use of the possibilities of the technology. What do you think? Leave your comments on his site(s).

Despite being Least Worst Best Man at his wedding (alongside Neal and Mr Radford Sallow's young friend Daniel), I'm increasingly convinced that Cynical Ben is simply a sock-puppet for legal eagle Jo Judge.

Update - according to Loose Ends on Radio 4, the overlap between a book and a blog is a 'blook'. Revolting.

Sorry students (and my boss)

I should have been marking essays today, and just couldn't face it. So I ran away to Manchester for a day of culture. First up - the Manchester Art Gallery, which has a stunning pre-Raphaelite collection and a lot of other good paintings too. I was particularly pleased to get an eyeball level view of Ford Madox Brown's Work, a multilayered, slightly satirical work which featured in a very good Victorian literature lecture to which I went recently. I nicked the image from the wonderful Victorian Web

Whilst there, I had coffee with my lawyer, which made me feel very sophisticated. Actually, however, Jo is the long-suffering wife of Cynical Ben (yes, readers, he's taken), for whom I was officially Least Worst Best Man - there were three of us. She also returned my Map Twats flask, which I'd left at their abode on a previous walking trip: a joyful reunion. 

After that, skip a couple of blocks and you get to the John Rylands Library, an incredible mock-Gothic reading room stuffed with the finest collection of texts you'll ever see, from Egyptian papyri to early Gospels to Caxton, a Shakespeare First Folio and first Sonnets, a Gutenberg book and a first edition of Joyce's Ulysses, of which I've now seen three of the 1000 copies printed - the one for sale was €40,000. The core of the collection was the Spencer family's library - Diana's family gave up reading in the 19th century and sold the lot. Seriously though, if you like books, or architecture, or mad Victorian schemes for public improvement, the Rylands is amazing. (Both the Art Gallery and the Library are free, by the way).

Lunch in Chinatown, then home having only purchased two books: E. H. Gombrich's A Little History of the World which is utterly charming and you should all buy a copy, and a comparative book on different poetic forms which you may not appreciate so much. 

Fun-packed weekends

Instead of going to watch Rochdale FC from an executive box (pitch frozen), we ate a lot of cheese, went to Manchester's finest Japanese restaurant and tried not to get annoyed by fashionable types, then went sledging above Heptonstall after paying our respects (!) at the grave of Sylvia Plath. I bought a lot of books and got heckled by lesbians in Hebden Bridge in the style of Drive-By Abuser. All in all, a great weekend.

Apologies to Jo's parents. Despite my best man's speech at their daughter's wedding opening with a Rohypnol joke, they tried to say hello to me at the Richard Thompson gig, but I didn't hear - I feel really bad.