• Tankerton Slopes, November #4

    A final batch of martime tuftiness from my trip out to Tankerton Slopes at the beginning of the week. I was just thinking how some of these would make for particularly cruel jigsaw puzzles…

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  • Chimera Book 1 / Chapter 10 – Caramels & Coconut Cracknell

    It’s 4 o’clock, there’s a nip in the air, and with a little bit of luck there’s a slice of cake nearby. Time then to rejoin Kyp Finnegan and Atticus Weft in their continuing adventures in the fantastical realm of Chimera, the realm of lost things.

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  • Tankerton Slopes, November #3 (2020)

    Another celebration of the always-surprising subtleties of texture, tone and colour in the everyday scrub of another patch of local wild plants and grasses. As I was taking these images, I could smell the sea at my back and hear the keening of the gulls above me, and somehow the waves found themselves into my…

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  • Dan Snelgrove: “There’ll Never Be Another Girl Like Stacey!”

    Chapter 9 of Chimera Book 1 – entitled Captain Toothache & The Silver Locket – takes place in a locked room, with Kyp Finnegan, the book’s 8 eight year old hero, and Atticus Weft, a snake comprised from all the odd socks that go missing from your washing machines, baring their souls. It doesn’t have…

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  • Throwback Friday #28 Weak Kneed (2003)

    It’s a lesser known fact about me that I’m sometimes known to write a song or two when the mood strikes. That mood used to strike much more often, I think because I didn’t second guess myself as much as I do now. I’m no musician after all, so what gives me the temerity to…

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  • Tankerton Slopes, November #2 (2020)

    More salted, windswept skeins and matted hummocks on the sea-facing rise of Tankerton Slopes.

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  • Phil Cooper / Painting Chimera #5

    Chapter 9 of Chimera Book 1 is a very important one to me. I took the decision at the outset of the very first draft of Chimera that the reader’s first experience of the novel should mirror Kyp Finnegan’s – a head-long rush down the rabbit hole, breathless, panicked, sensorially intense – a boy on…

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  • Tankerton Slopes, November #1 (2020)

    A short walk along Whitstable’s blustery sea front and you arrive at Tankerton Slopes, a long steep rise of scrubby grass, hog’s fennel and brambles. In the depths of winter, kids sledge down the slopes, speeding down towards the colourful beach huts and the shingle beach. Now, the long unkempt grasses are dry and bleached,…

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  • Chimera Book 1 / Chapter 9 – Captain Toothache & The Silver Locket

    It’s 4pm on Sunday afternoon, which means, here in Red’s Kingdom, it’s time once again to gather around the wireless (or more probably your smart phone!) and continue Kyp Finnegan’s adventures in the curious, fantastical realm of Chimera – a world of peril, danger and excitement!

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  • MFT #8 Halloween (1978)

    MFT #8 Halloween (1978)

    John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween is one of my favorite things. Here’s why.

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