School Visit with Close Encounters, Film Club UK
Nick will be visiting Wilsthorpe Community College in Nottingham on 21st June 2011 as part of the Close Encounters programme with Film Club UK. http://www.filmclub.org/close-encounters
read moreLiterary Death Match
Nick will be reading from his novel, Don Don, at Literary Death Match on Wednesday 17th August 2011: http://www.literarydeathmatch.com/
read moreSociety Today – Britain’s Foreign Bosses
Society Today, Vol. 1, No.3, Summer 2006 With a new world order where money is placed above all else, British corporations are increasingly looking beyond the Great Isle – to the international market of talented executives – in order to recruit the best person to drive up share prices and maximise profits: the candidate’s professional competence and business acumen is judged to be far more important than whether or not he or she is native-born, a British citizen. A quarter of the FTSE 100 companies have foreigners at the helm, from...
read moreSociety Today – Why Are They Begging?
Society Today, Vol. 1, No. 2, November/December 2005 This is the question on our lips when we walk past a man or woman huddled in the doorway of a shop front like some desperate animal, wrapped in a dirty blanket clinging to it for warmth, hiding a face smeared with grime and shame, and clutching a polystyrene cup with a few coppers in it. In one sense we are bloody foolish to even ask the question. Shelter is like food and sex – we need it – and if we don’t have it, then we’ll look for ways to get it. Let us be frank but the...
read moreRoof – Child Soldier
Roof, Shelter’s Magazine, October 2008 Imagine this. You are forced from your bed at gunpoint in the middle of the night, tied up and dragged off, half-naked and barefoot, into the wilderness. You are made to walk for twelve hours, then permitted to rest, but for no more than two hours, on hard ground, on a bed of leaves, in the dirt, damp and rain. You are not fed, just given water. And then you are ordered to walk again, for another twelve hours. This goes on for three days, and by the end of it you are starving and exhausted, and your...
read moreRoof – The Broken-Hearted
Roof, Shelter’s magazine, September/October 2006 The plight of the homeless first really dawned on me when I was twenty-one and living in America. My friend, Justin, and I were fast running out of money and needed work: we’d prepaid the rent on a short-term let – a poky studio flat just big enough to swing a cat in – and had just a few weeks remaining before we were out in the cold. Well, at least we were in Los Angeles, we told ourselves, the sun nearly always out in southern California. But, thankfully, work came in the nick of...
read moreA Descent Into Darkness
It was the beginning of 2007 and life ambled along until the darkness struck, creeping up on me like a dense black cloud and then raining down on me, upon which my world was turned upside down for good. I was thirty-four years old, still single, and wondered whether I was destined to be a lifelong bachelor: I had not been in a committed relationship for a number of years. My writing provided me with the rationale to be alone. Were I in a relationship, I would write less, be less productive. Were I married, I would be a negligent husband, in...
read moreI Aspire to Be Downwardly Mobile!
William Styron, in his wonderful short story, Shadrach, describes how his young ten-year-old protagonist loved the Dabneys because they were happy to bask in “casual squalor”, possessing a total absence “of the bourgeois aspirations and gentility which were my own inheritance.” This inheritance is ours also, every Briton’s, Thatcher’s free market crusade and promotion of rampant individualism creating a foul breed of Daily Mail reader still obsessed with family values and the defense of conservative...
read morePutin’s Dark Imperium
I’ve had a passion for Russian literature since I was a teenager. Its grand themes of murder and redemption were always going to hold more appeal to a troubled adolescent than the airs and graces of yet another Austen novel – I pray the British people tire of her soon! – and after reading too much Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn as a postgraduate, I wanted to write something Russian. I travelled throughout the country in 2008, making it as far as Magadan, the Russian Far East, the gateway to Gulag hell. It became clear...
read moreThe Equality and Humanity of Communal Showers
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks gave his Thought for the Day yesterday on BBC Radio Four. His principal observation was the crucial sanctuary which places of worship provide from the demands of a success-obsessed modern world. It might matter what car you’re driving or what brand you’re wearing outside a church, mosque or synagogue, but once inside one it does not, all of us equal in the eyes of Jesus, Mohammed or Yahweh. Sacks is right, and such places are, therefore, of immense value. As I’m neither a practicing Christian, Muslim nor...
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