One of those perfect days

Just a quick hello as I have a quiet five minutes. I've spent the day with Neal, Dan and Georgie, Dan's social worker. Well, girlfriend. We had a wander round my mother's lovely garden, pursued by hens, and then around the Dorothy Clive garden, nodding sagely while Dan and Georgie named various flowers and stuff. I took a few good pictures, including several of a very obliging rabbit, and ate wonderful ice-cream. I'll post some when I get back to the office. 

Then it was off to a antiques craft village (Dagfields Farm), where I managed to spend £30 on books in very little time, despite not having a working cash card yet… it's hard to resist two beautiful 1895/1896 pocket editions of Tennyson ('Locksley Hall' and Other Poems, 'The Spinster's Sweet-Arts' and Other Poems), another Left Book Club edition (Ruth Gruber's I Went to the Soviet Arctic, 1939), Susannah Radstone's Sweet Dreams, about sexuality and gender in popular fiction, a Moomins book I now realise I already have, a good Faber edition of Selected Poems of Louis MacNeice, John Christopher's The Year of the Comet and an M. John Harrison novel I hadn't previously seen, The Committed Men. 

Best of all, I hardly scraped the surface of the place and will have to return again, and again, and again…

Swindon, come in Swindon

At the moment, British SF is the best in the world: M John Harrison, Gwyneth Jones, Ken MacLeod, China Miéville and loads of others are writing future/science fiction which examines the state of the world and humanity in fascinating, mindblowing ways: SF has always been a more profound genre than the literary pages allow. I'm interested in the hard-science and political versions, which is why I love MacLeod's work so much - many of his books represent an anarchist-Trotskyist Scottish galactic civilisation. What's not to love?

The Guardian has a piece on this theme today.

(Post title is from Eddy Izzard's riff on the British space expedition).