Obsessive Compulsive
Queen's Elastoplast dress
Posted by AL Kennedy - 05 January 2009 11:27
A Credit Crunch is just some kind of half-arsed pudding. We’re going to get through it by enjoying generosity and sharing simple pleasures, just like the good old Queen said
The queen joins in the credit crunch from her palace...
Aaah, the French. I know, I know, I haven’t blogged for a bit, Christmas and the New Year have passed, the telly was rubbish, the weather was cold enough to snap dogs… but first I was with the French. They threw me off beam, got me all relaxed.
It’s ages since I’ve met the French and I’d missed them. I’d missed looking at Paris after dark – which was ...
Gastric distress
Posted by AL Kennedy - 08 December 2008 11:35
I fail to see how viewers could be expected to believe in a heroine who wouldn’t fall for a man with a large facial scar, several mental difficulties and a metal hand
Well, that’s the next book done, then… It’s always a complete anti-climax when a book’s finished. You’ll pootle about your flat afterwards with a numb/emptied feeling, then send if off before beginning the enormous wait for anyone to get back to you.
The pause left at this point always being far too long – even if it’s only a few hours (not that it ever is only a few ...
Scotland's Simon Cowell?
Posted by AL Kennedy - 25 November 2008 15:55
I've been portrayed as some kind of godawful combination of Elizabeth Bathory, Simon Cowell and Bird Flu and have turned out to be a terrible anti-climax...
Neither a pop competition judge nor a prolific serial killer, AL Kennedy stopped short of expectations
Those of you who read this blog with any kind of regularity will know that I’m currently locked in a potentially unsafe spiral of typing and more typing with food, sanity, sleep and all of that other being alive stuff removed to a safe distance so that it can’t interfere – which isn’t really a spiral, now I think of it, more like being trapped in a lift in an ...
Selling off Scotland
Posted by AL Kennedy - 10 November 2008 12:17
'I'm amazed that an SNP government would be so intent on turning our country into some kind of heathery play park for the super rich and plausible'
I'm at home. This doesn't happen. I'm never at home. I never have time to look in all my cupboards and dust. (As it turns out, there's quite a lot stored in my dust.) I've been in my own flat for almost two weeks. Good God, this is unheard of and had I not been strapped into my big black typing chair and imaginary places for almost all of this ...
Begone, financial vampires
Posted by A L Kennedy - 21 October 2008 12:43
AL Kennedy is on the move. Pondering the romantic potential of Stockholm Syndrome, she takes time out to wish exile on the moneymen
It was bound to happen – the final twangy bit holding my mental compartments together (or, indeed, apart) was eventually bound to go ping and leave me. I think that happened in Blackpool. Not sure. I have, since we last spoke, been flinging myself into the joys of a writer’s autumn: festivals, festivals and then some touring and more festivals. So Wigtown was followed by Blackpool, by London, by Stockholm, ...
Noxious vapours
Posted by AL Kennedy - 06 October 2008 14:46
Good wishes to those troubled bankers, the perils of sniffing damp repelling liquid and how to touch the arm of strangers and not quite get away with it
Oh, those poor, innocent bankers and traders. Especially at Lloyds/TSB –they didn’t in anyway blight 10 years of my life. I’m sending love to them. I think it’s love – something that makes my ears bleed, anyway.
I’ve spent three days distracting myself from their plight by painting my mother’s house (located in what are now the rice paddies of Warwickshire) with a damp-repelling liquid that comes in an ...
Locked up with writers
Posted by AL Kennedy - 17 September 2008 10:03
No duffers, no loons, they could cook, they were funny and twisted and many of them had nice mums - AL Kennedy on the highs and lows of residential courses
Once again I am hunched in the only office I may ever know – a train - my own lovely home being a distant memory filled with housework and DVD’s I haven’t watched for ages. On this occasion I’m in a Birmingham-bound diesel office which has managed to sneak out of Edinburgh Waverly without being – thus far – stymied by all of the apocalyptic and mysterious things that happen ...
Speed dating
Posted by AL Kennedy - 02 September 2008 09:29
It occurred to me my personal equivalent of speed dating is, in fact, the hotel fire scare. In many ways a group of strangers in damp car park at 3am is an ideal way to meet new chums
I am writing this on a train – to be precise, the train that I had to buy a ticket for when it turned out that the train I had a ticket for didn’t exist as a result of obscure and perhaps satanic influences – or simply because it’s a British train and therefore one small, but highly effective, part of a multi-layered plan to make travelling by public transport ...
Festival Leprosy
Posted by A L Kennedy - 19 August 2008 09:30
Vile diseases and avaricious banks - AL Kennedy finds that Edinburgh's festival season isn't all lollipops and balloons
One of the many interesting chance elements which always enters into the Edinburgh Festival mix, is disease. Not to be too graphic, you spend your semi-waking days watching, or working in various warm, moist venues full of strangers who breathe, cough, giggle, guffaw, sigh, yawn and generally spread the usually very private and intimate contents of their lungs all over the shop, you utilise extremely well-used conveniences (with much less-used ...
Evil twin?
Posted by AL Kennedy - 05 August 2008 09:50
Poor Gordon - perhaps soon to be replaced by one or another Miliband. They’re twins. What happens if we get the evil twin? I’ve watched enough Hammer horror films to know this is surely a risk
Something of an eventful fortnight behind me. The weekend before last I had to pick up the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. This involved flying to Salzburg – cue much head twitching and feeble attempts at self-hypnosis in various bits of Gatwick. Eventually my imagination simply became so exhausted by picturing smiley things and projection screens and giving air gunners encouraging hugs that it could no longer picture my ...
Train on fire
Posted by AL Kennedy - 23 July 2008 10:01
The attitude on arriving late at Latitude and the perils of reading AL Kennedy. Scotland's foremost writer on life, October love and preparing for Edinburgh
I’m sure you’ve already guessed this – the most stylish possible way to arrive at a summer festival is on board a burning train. So my trip to Latitude was pretty much perfect. As the smoke billowed, we were detained at Berwick for more than an hour. This was “…due to the driver carrying out safety checks.” As matters progressed, we learned that a) train announcements will always avoid mentioning ...
Perfect arse
Posted by AL Kennedy - 07 July 2008 09:52
Life offers joys to appreciate. For instance, only the other day, a gentleman wearing a Star Wars Storm trooper mask showed me his bottom...
Dear readers, allow me to announce that I have actually finished a short story. After weeks of nonsense, distractions, train trips and psychotic breaks I really, truly did manage to cobble together enough minutes to put one word after another for 22 of your earth pages and there it is – probably ugly and deeply flawed, but a story nonetheless.
In many ways, in fact, quite a dandy fortnight has ...
Lost in Brussels
Posted by AL Kennedy - 20 June 2008 14:35
AL Kennedy on the perils of visiting Brussels, how to spot the British amidst a foreign crowd and on talking football in German when you don't understand it in English
Sadly, I missed getting hit on the head by police batons at the anti-Bush protests. (Why is it - and I’m asking seriously – that police are so very suggestible ? Dress them in riot gear and they do like to bust things up. Mix them with US enforcement and they get all Vietnam on your ass.) And, as we know, the police usually try to bully crowds if they ...
Stunned as a drug mule
Posted by AL Kennedy - 05 June 2008 09:41
My eyelid spasm seems to have cleared up, my noddy head tick is abating and I now have only the dearlordspareme head shaking manoeuvre. AL Kennedy goes on tour...
Okay, if a B&B shower has a switch and two dials, would you also expect a toggle? – a secret, unfindable toggle? - to be involved in producing hot water and therefore preventing hypothermia and/or trench foot? I’m just asking – nothing to with my life, or the fact that I can have no sensation below the knee.
Dear reader, what can I say ? It’s been a busy fortnight. ...
Elongated spasms
Posted by AL Kennedy - 19 May 2008 11:32
This week, AL Kennedy composes begging letters and officiates at a showbiz wedding
Well, I’m still alive. I think. A combination of stress and research now means that I’ve developed a wibbly eyelid and two different head ticks. I think the eyelid annoys only me, but the head ticks are a bit much for the general public. The main one involves my head shaking itself in a perfectly understandable ohpleaseno kind of motion. I’ve tried to adjust this into a more positive yeswhynotifIhaveto ...
