The Moon Landings

Me Featuring in The Sunday Times, Nicely...

This happened. The editor thinks it's a book of dog sitter stories waiting to happen. I am scribbling away at same... I first house-sat by accident. I was originally at Haven House, Lembton, as a live-in safety net for Lady Olive Simmonds, a seventy-nine year-old Bostonian with a lilac afro, a Temazepam habit and leg ulcers. Haven House was by the sea. Eighteenth century, elegant, comfortable. But there was Olive... Always in pain; either drunk, hungover or both; barely educated. She had married a man who was knighted, and believed this gave her a licence to be a twat. According to Olive, her fellow Lembtonians were all dull academics - this group having reading ages older than hers, which was thirteen - or failed schizophrenics. She had serious monophobia, with staff working (unnecessarily) every day apart from weekends. At weekends, first thing, anxious, she would ring round the Lembtonians that were still speaking to her - six in number - inviting them for coffee, ...

My Mate Jamie-Ray Hartshorne

I've been noticing that alongside photos of Jamie-Ray being a lead in Altar Boys , creating Change My Body UK TM , working the door at Freedom - and clearly asking people passing by wherever that rockpool may be to snap a double-bicep - this sort of thing is cropping up on his social media: We're in The Diner, Jamestown Road, Camden. He's between tour dates of The Bodyguard, and meetings to discuss sportswear and creatine endorsements. The latter, he says, being all about making his product better. Between sips of his peanut butter milkshake (he's allowing himself dairy today in my honour - I don't quite know how to take that) he says in his soft Brum, 'I've signed up for a major Muay Thai event in Thailand next February. I'm going up against one of the Thai fighters. That's the only real way to gain any respect in the fighting world. That's why you've been noticing the combat photos. I...

I Love the Library

Therese, soprano, never uses a library. ‘Oh, no, Iestyn. Unlike you, I pride myself on always buying my books.’ I agree with Helene Hanff, who said that buying a book you haven’t read is like buying a dress without trying it on. ‘How do you know the dress will fit, Therese?’ I asked. ‘I always know what’s going to fit me, book-wisely speaking. I tune into asking the universe what it needs me to read for the greater good, go into the bookshop and find that I’m drawn to a department, then a section of carpet, then the particular shelf and there will book the book, in a sort of outline of almost light picked out from the others around it.’ ‘But there are billions of books out there, Therese, in umpteen shops, divided into squillions of bits of carpet and…’ She was giving me her look: a nurse at my hospital bed telling me the prognosis was far from ideal. ‘Yes, but with me it’s narrowed down q...

Iestyn Edwards is...what?

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