I’m reading sci-fi at the moment, though I probably shouldn’t. I’m Irish, and we’re not used to it. When I was growing up, we had six television channels. Four English ones, and two Irish wans. In twenty years, the only sci-fi was Red Dwarf and Doctor Who. Both on the English channels, of course. After all, we Irish only recently started believing in the present. Back in the eighties, we didn’t have roads; we had strips of potholes. Condoms were prescription-only, and six of the island’s...
11 days ago • 1 min read
My mother didn’t have it easy. She didn’t even have a sense of smell. And while the rest of 1980s Ireland had miraculous moving statues, we made do with mysterious margarine. Back in those days, butter was bad and margarine was good, so young Morgan et al. all ate margarine. Sometimes my breakfast toast tasted fine with it. Some mornings the margarine was weird. A brand new tub. Just opened the previous night. I had put it on my evening toast. My mother had put it on her evening potatoes. No...
18 days ago • 1 min read
Families are great. But a lot. If you’ve had about enough of yours, tell them this is a very important email you have to read. I’ll back you up. And it is important, as I present some crazy New Year traditions, that will make your party go with a bang! Killer List of 10 Bread-Based New Year Traditions. 1. At a party, wait until the countdown to the new year starts before throwing a bread roll over your shoulder. You might hit the person you one day marry in the face with it. 2. Villages used...
25 days ago • 2 min read
The Battle Smurfs are back in the cinema. James Cameron calls it Avatar, but we all know. We visited the cinema last week to see Osgood Perkins’ new film, Keeper, which was excellent. No cinema this week. Sorry, but No Papa Smurf + No Smurfette = No Morgan in the Audience. I’ll catch up on my reading instead. When we lived in Berlin, I went to DVD rental shop, Videodrom, every day. On the way home from work, I’d pop in, grab whatever looked most interesting and then go home. Watch the DVD. Or...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
I got caught in the terrifying crosshairs of Facebook’s war on AI this week. Trying to contact author Robert Shearman for a non-fiction thing, I “friended” him on Facebook last Friday. I also posted a link to my “Stupid Paranoia” YouTube video, which mentioned naked plumbers. One of those things – or the combination of both – made Facebook suspend my account in case I was a rogue AI. To prove otherwise, I had to upload a video of my face. When I tried, my webcam wouldn’t work, showing a...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Congratulations to Hippolyte Pixii for winning my Name of the Week award! Posthumous congrats, I’m afraid, as he passed away in 1835. Hippolyte Pixii is famous for building an early model magneto. Magnetos are like dynamos, but produce alternating current (AC), while dynamos produce direct current (DC). And if you win a pub quiz with any of that information, I get 10% of your hamper. I stumbled across Hippolyte while researching dynamos for The Cat Wore Black. Before realising I didn’t need...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
it’s been all bloody go here at the HQ of the Official Hawkinge-By-Hythe Historical Society. First, I had those man sniffles, then a sudden change in weather gave me a migraine. And then I got lumbago. Look, I hate making a fuss, but I’m putting my foot down – carefully, because of the lumbago – whoever has the Morgan voodoo doll, could you stop now, please? The internet tells me “lumbago” is an “outdated term for lower back pain”, and I agree. We should all be using the more evocative German...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Made you look, you dirty duck. Made you look for nothing. That’s the version we sang as children after tricking someone into looking at nothing. Or “gnaw-tin” with the proper Irish accent. Different places around the world have different versions of the song. Perhaps you were a dirty crook rather than a duck. Or at risk of being turned into turtle soup. But the game is best played in Germany, where they don’t seem to know it. When we moved to Heidelberg, our flatmate Anne loved to suddenly...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Listen. Do you hear that? Numbers, floating in the air around us. Trying to tell me something. Listen. It can’t be a coincidence because in my next book, The Cat Wore Black, radios come to Hawkinge-By-Hythe. People love them. Radio gives them all sorts of things. Music, news, entertainment. And when the station stops broadcasting at night, the radios transmit strange random numbers. Which gives them the willies. Then I read in Wired that plastic surgeons use the formula of the Fibonacci...
2 months ago • 1 min read
as the days contract, leaking inky night into the cold evenings, we need more music. And there’s a final Bandcamp this year, on December 5th, so here’s what I think you should get. AVTT/PTTN is The Avett Brothers (American folk-rock) with Mike Patton (Faith No More, Fantomas, Mr Bungle, etc.). And that’s exactly what you get: Mike Patton doing things to rock songs. Sold, but I still want that next Fantomas album, please. Next! There’s something very wrong with a world where the Sleaford Mods...
2 months ago • 1 min read
