Comic Cuts — 6 November 2026

A somewhat bitsy week as I'm trying to finish some tasks that would otherwise be left hanging in limbo, most of which involved sorting out photos before shipping them all off onto an external hard drive, probably to be forgotten as I sink into old age and then deleted when I finally kick the bucket. I'm determined that, now I'm over the half-way mark (I'm planning to stick around until the next big eclipse event in 2081), that I'll actually finish a job when I start one. 

I was a latecomer to digital cameras, buying my first in 2007; I didn't have a mobile phone for years after that and only relatively recently bought a phone that had a better camera than the one I owned. But it's so easy to take a couple of hundred photos when you're out and about as there's no additional costs (processing, buying an album to put them in, replacement films) and you're no longer limited to 24 or 36 pictures. But so many thousands of photos now reside on an external hard drive and, frankly, I don't have the time to sort through them. Not until I retire, anyway.

However, the photos I'm taking now I'm determined to sort through, weeding out all but the best, and posting them, either publicly here or on Facebook, or shared privately with family. That's why you've recently been seeing posts about some of the trips we've been taking, with more to come. 

It's also incredibly satisfying deleting four to five hundred photos off my phone once I've copied them over to my laptop.

Mel and I have also been sorting out a few books that we wanted to get rid of. We ended up with about 150 books in six boxes and managed to sell half of them. Not for a lot, but it will pay a couple of bills. All I've got to do now is figure out where the hell I can squirrel away three boxes of unsold books...

My month of pricking and prodding by health professionals ended Monday with a trip to the dentist, who earned the equivalent of £558/hour from the 3 minute check-up I went in for. And that's NHS rates. It would be £1500/hour if I went private.

On a happier note, we went to see Mitch Benn for the second time this year in a tiny theatre rehearsal room. We'd seen him in June when he was touring The Lehrer Effect. This time it was his latest show, Asking Elvis, which revealed how he came to be the Elvis impersonator on the Steve Wright in the Afternoon show on Radio 2 for many years. There were some songs, some chat, some more songs – modern ones in the style of Elvis – stories about Elvis, and lots of insights into how a segment starring Elvis came to be in Steve Wright's show, much of it explained by Elvis himself — or Elvis Mitch-self at least.

It was a fine Friday night's entertainment.

Somewhere in between, I've managed to sort out the contract for the next SEXTON BLAKE book with Rebellion, paid the previous license fee and now have everything lined up for the book's release at the end of the month. 

Phew! Just in time for me to take another few days away from the laptop, as I'm planning to go to the latest Paperback Fair in Bloomsbury on Sunday, then we're out and about on Tuesday and Wednesday. At some point I really need to knuckle down and get some writing done, see if I can't earn some cash to pay for all these days out!