New Blog Project

I’m launching a new blog today called Tales from a Rat Biker. This is a project that’s very close to my heart and long overdue. Lockdown has given me the time to actually do it. This isn’t a blog about mechanics, or a particular brand. It’s more of a lifestyle/cultural history project, with articles on…

Tales from The Boneyard: Our Anniversary, The Teenage Werewolves, and Dr Diablo & The Rodent Show

Last Sunday night found me in Camden Town with Gracie, standing in a cold queue outside The Underworld Club between a guy from Tottenham with Gene Vincent painted on the back of his leather, the oldest punk in the world, and some young bloke who’d just joined an indie band I now can’t remember the…

Where I Write

When I started working on the project that became Shark Alley I still had a fifth-floor office at the University of Fukui, writing at an old metal desk by a huge window, its massive concrete sill cracked by earthquakes, looking out across a vast cityscape towards snow-capped mountains and the Sea of Japan.

A Stroll On The Heath

This is another fragment found amongst the Jack Vincent Papers, the first volume of which I edited and published last year. Like the story of the murderer George Slaughter, this curious little anecdote was not part of the packet containing the second memoir, and I confess that I am not entirely sure where it belongs. I’ve decided to share it here because it confirms my theory that Jack Vincent and the author and traveller George Borrow knew each other, while also providing an interesting portrait of my hometown, Norwich, in the early-1850s…