User Profile

I decided to update my bio because so much has changed over the last few months. Also, occasionally random people are stumbling across this these days and I'm needy enough to want people to have a vague impression of what I'm really like away from the sarcasm. Shame to lose the story about the mouse though, it really happened and it was very cute.

Anyway, about me. Weirdly, for someone who spends so much time on a vanity project like this blog, I'm not much good at talking about myself. So what to do?

I live on Tyneside, an adoptive home but one for which I have a deep love. I don't think I'd ever leave, unless one day I can afford a rural farmhouse in Northumberland with a big log fire and a library room, preferably near Alnwick or Bamburgh. Somewhere I can sit by the fire on long winter evenings, listening to the wind howl and the trees scratch at the windows whilst a big floppy dog sleeps on the hearth in front of me. I'd like to have someone to share it with one day, but at the moment, for a variety of regrettable but probably fair reasons, it's just me and my unfeasibly large collection of commodities produced by the culture industry. And yes, it's a terribly bourgeois dream but I currently live in a cramped and overflowing attic room at the top of a Victorian terrace, so Ihope it's excusable.

I'm a (not very good) Trotskyite revolutionary socialist with a dry sense of humour, a good line in sarcasm, a sentimental streak wider than the Tyne, and a Major Clanger that makes a noise if you squeeze it. I have some education that I've picked up both in my homelands in the midlands and up here in the NE.

I've worked in all sorts of jobs and am currently on a training course for a new career, one which I'm hoping will be reasonably recession-proof.

I've probably gone on too long already, but here's a list of stuff I like, in case you're interested. Obviously it's not a definitive list, but who on earth would want such a thing?

My favourite author at the moment is Angela Carter, but I've had a really good year for books this year and there's plenty of competition for the top spot (Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Upton Sinclair, Robert Tressell, Jonathan Coe, Robert Rankin, Pat Barker, Umberto Eco, Jose Saramago, currently enjoying Madame Bovary). My favourite film of all time is The Big Sleep, and my favourite philosopher is Wittgenstein.

Favourite band: Mclusky; favourite composer: Mahler, Shostakovitch or Beethoven, depending on mood. I'm afraid I also like jazz, but I'm not a proper buff, I just have a few Duke and Satchmo albums and some Bix Beiderbecke. I'm a jazz fraud, really.

Favourite TV shows - Spaced, Peep Show, the Beiderbecke Trilogy, Doctor Who, Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, Family Guy, Battlestar Galactica, Nevermind the Buzzcocks, Harry Hill's TV Burp. They're the ones I'd stay up for anyway.

Right, I think that's it. That's probably far too much information anyway. Go on, bugger off.

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