First is, please support the Strumpet. I'm in it. A long, lightly fictionalised, autobiographical comic - the longest thing I've drawn for some time. Here's a taster. If you'd like to see more, go fund it!
Secondly, please come along to my book signing at The Book Barge on Monday 24th September. It will be moored outside The Narrowboat Pub, Islington. There are rumours of wine and if you're lucky I'll draw you a free biro tattoo.
* The woman who lights fires/the flirt
...continued from last week. Click here for the start of the story...
To be continued next week...
TAGS: OXFORD, QI CLUB, CORNER CLUB, ARGUMENTS, TAJ MAHAL CURRY HOUSE, MOVING HOUSE
OK, a little while ago, I was telling you a story.
Then I broke off for an
But now I'm back, and in colour...
You might remember, I was living in the Last Affordable Bedsit in Islington, but there was someone I forgot to mention...
Check out my back issues by clicking on 'A little light fiction' in my archive categories, right-hand toolbar.
More next week...
..contined from here. Go here for the first episode...
I began to travel to Oxford to see him each weekend. I would take a coach from London during the grey hours of the evening after work each Friday. The bus drove through a cutting in the Chiltern hills on the Oxfordshire border, so deep and narrow that it resembled a birth canal. By the time I reached Oxford, day had magically changed to night and I had been reborn. I was no longer a reluctant and unimportant editorial assistant but an active participant in a city of convoluted alleys, winding around the crenellated hubs of colleges and libraries like the runnels in a great, grey brain. Oxford and London seemed to be not 50 miles, but worlds apart.
I didn't notice at first how, in Oxford, everything was grey: the dark shiny gloss paint on the staircase walls of the college where Tom taught history, which continued to a height beyond which sticky undergraduate fingers could be presumed to reach; the greyish-white paint above it, which wandered, indiscriminatingly, across the ceiling. The stone of the colleges was grey too, apart from the places where it was being scraped away by restorers to reveal an alarmingly lurid mustard. As the expectant grey of each dawn gave way to the dismal grey of each Oxford Autumn morning, a helmet of clouds clamped down tight over the city for the day, for the rest of the year.
