Alice and the Caterpillar is an independent record shop hidden away in a side-street. The place is tiny, but decidedly atmospheric. Back then, the main room was really gloomy because of all the posters and leaflets obscuring the shop window – retro psychedelic artwork for 60’s festivals and recent flyers advertising local raves. There was a counter buried beneath piles of records and music papers but every other inch of space was taken up by boxes and boxes of LP sleeves. Not a single CD in sight. The place reeked of burning joss sticks and the dim light, the sitar music on the nineteenth century stereo and the mild looking old man with long silver hair and John Lennon glasses made you question reality and glance at the door, to reassure yourself that the timegate back to the 21st century was still operational. http://www.facebook.com/tortoisebook
Harper Collins are relaunching my second novel as an ebook on June 21, Set in the 19thc, it flits between the opulence of the Great Exhibition and the poverty of the capital’s slum districts.
Henry Hilditch reports on the London that the Exhibition’s visitors don’t know, while photographers Cornelius Touchfarthing and John Rankin offer their own ways of seeing this burgeoning city. Underlying all is Hilditch’s search for the love he lost at Florence.
It’s been a battle to get the formatting right, but Tortoise is now being distributed by major sellers. www.kobobooks.com is retailing it at £2.18 and it should appear in iBooks in about a fortnight. Kindle users can get compatible versions from all these sellers, as far as I know. You can get tasters of the book at http://www.facebook.com/tortoisebook
William Shakespeare, who is really famous with teachers, said, “No jewel is like Rosalind”, and I don’t think he ever said a truer thing, not even in Shakespeare in Love.
Prom night. Our latest American import and one which is fast becoming as ubiquitous as a Big Mac. It’s the new rite of passage for upper sixth formers about to go off to university to encounter a whole new world of opportunity, drugs and debt. Like the long wedding scene in The Deer Hunter before Robert de Niro and Christopher Walken go off to get fucked up in Vietnam.
Tortoise, Ross Gilfillan 2012
I prayed an awful lot and extremely hard, for just this result. How soon do you get an answer to your prayers, anyway? God must get billions of prayers every day and half of them are probably just spam, so maybe he’s only just got around to answering mine.
“Paul Rogers, all in black, is shaking a huge mane of hair and stomping his boots as All Right Now thunders across the laid-back crowds on a hot summer’s day, way back in hippie history. He grips two tape-bound mikes as he belts out the repetitive anthem while Paul Kossoff, a pretty boy with as much hair as Rogers, makes guitar playing look like an orgasmic experience.
‘That my friend,’ says Faruk, ‘is rock and roll.’”
Tortoise, Ross Gilfillan, 2012
She shuffles down the bed and begins to pull them off. Down they go, over my thighs and knees until all I have on are my Spiderman underpants which look so cool riding up over my low-slung jeans but look painfully silly right now.
Tortoise, Ross Gilfillan 2012
17 is a difficult age for B.J. Neither his three friends, his secretive family nor Roger, the decor-loving football hooligan, can help him in his search to find himself – and lose his virginity. A comic novel about love, death, sex (and Goths) by the author of The Snake Oil Dickens Man and The Edge of the Crowd.
You don’t have to go far to find some pleasing places. This was North Norfolk, last July.
About Scattergood
