I well remember sitting at a bar in Logan Airport, Boston, and watching the great cattledammerung of the mid-1990s on a flickering TV: mechanical grabbers lifting up tons of twitching steak tartare and dropping it into enormous trenches. It looked like the smorgasbord of the Devil himself. Ruminating over a few fluid ounces of Miller Lite, it occurred to me that this could well be The End. But no, because in ’01, I found myself walking across the causeway to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, shod penitently in £1,300 calf leather walking boots, while behind me a 30-mile swath of the Northumbrian coast was visible in the sunlight: the smoke from scores of death barbecues wavering up into the heavens, as once again the British cattle industry was near-annihilated.
Monthly Archives: September 2008
Will on Radio 5 Live
Will is due to talk on the Simon Mayo programme on Radio 5 Live at 2.30pm today about his new collection of stories, Liver. You can listen to Will talk about the Colony Club, how he and his son sang “Happy birthday to us”, why the Shetland literary festival is one of the best and some of what has inspired his next book here, for seven days only.
Southport Arts Centre
Will is going to be at the Southport Arts Centre tonight at 7pm. There’s a short interview with him in the Southport Visiter, which also has details of the event.
Francis Bacon and the Male Muse
In the latest autumn-winter issue of GQ Style magazine, Will has written about ‘Francis Bacon and the Male Muse’.
Free thinking
Will is going to be opening Free Thinking on October 31 in Liverpool with a lecture examining the way in which the mind is represented in the novel. Does literature represent the mind as we really experience it, in all its terror, exhilaration and confusion?
For more information about the event, which will be on radio and online, visit here.
Street hassle
Will’s latest Standard column is here.
Beatrice’s blog 2
My blog here remains themeless, which makes me feel as though I am drifting, so I will continue with Working-For-Will as my working theme. This week I am not working for Will as he is away. I find myself with some extra time and keep ending up on the Circle Line, which is always where I end up when I’m going somewhere in London but I don’t quite know where it is. Most places that aren’t in Hackney are on the tube, and most place on the tube are gettable-at via Baker Street, Liverpool Street or King’s Cross, all of which are on the big yellow loop in the middle of the London Underground map. I know a man who believes the Circle Line drivers are stuck on its revolving trains, with no final destination at which they can look forward to alighting, going home for the day or indeed retiring. This is nonsense of course; Circle line trains frequently turn into Hammersmith and City Line or District Line trains, and do so quite at random with only a muffled tannoy announcement from the driver as notification. If you are travelling anti-clockwise, and listening to an ipod, you always risk ending up in Ealing.
Frozen music
Will’s latest Psychogeography column is here.
20.09.08
Little People In The City: The Street Art Of Slinkachu

Little People In The City – Slinkachu
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See all books by Slinkachu at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com
Will has written the foreword to Little People In The City: The Street Art Of Slinkachu – read on for more info.
In praise of the Brompton
Will’s hymn to the Brompton folding bike.