Empty Monkey (Dot Com) - The real-time story of how the book is written

Last night, or should I say earlier this morning, at about half past one, an elephant came crashing through the front doors. It was trumpeting and banging into things and someone was trying to calm it down by calling soothingly to it. but to little effect. All I was doing was trying to write. How on earth can anyone work in these conditions?

Still, I have had seven days of peace and quiet, so shouldn’t complain, don’t want to turn into a grumpy old man. Eventually the animal must have gone to sleep, because it woke me at 6 am. It was snoring . Loudly. The outside walls are over three feet thick, must be in excess of 200 years old, but the inner ones - they are built on the more up-to-date ‘drum-skin principal.

Consequently, no sound can enter, but any movement from within is amplified. such is progress.
I am not someone to make a fuss over life’s little irritations, however, when I went to brush my teeth at about 2. I discovered water all over the place. including the loo-seat. Ugh.
So I wrote a polite little note on a sheet of A4. It read: (more…)

The girl that took the photo of the author of ‘Finding a Way’ in the sahara desert, and the illustrator of ‘Tanzy’ both have MS.
So there will be no more ‘Plymouth-Dakar’ charity rallies - and no more paintings of ‘Tanzy’. Not for them. One cannot travel, the other cannot paint. it is a sad thing to see ones friends become dependant on wheelchairs.
One of the objectives in making this web-site was to raise some dosh for the ‘Merlin Project’ - which was the charity we drove ……km to Africa for.
Help us to make life a little less painful for my friends and all the others by whipping out that little bit of plastic and donating the price of a cappuccino. Thanks!

Needs a link to Merlin project and Plymouth-dakar!

Names have a strange power, they convey something more than the letters of the name, the sound of the name, the look of the written word, or the historical connotations. They mean something more than the word itself.
Who could be fearful of Alan-the-Hun? (talking of names, the name for ‘tartare-sauce’ in Polish looks like a familiar English ‘cream-cheese’ - but I assure you - it tastes awful on crispbread, I have just made that mistake, so ’sound-alike-names’ can be misunderstood). (more…)

This crazy project finally got it’s act together this afternoon.
Last night, quite late, I wound up in ‘Harris Jazz Bar’ in Old Krakow main square.
By the time I arrived, only one bar-stool remained unoccupied. Squeezing in, I sat down and looked around to see if Dr. Reimes was there.
He was not, probably gone back to Berlin. Yesterday, he had introduced himself to me, and an interesting conversation ensued where we jumped from Baroque music to Jazz to Greek history to Hitler by way of atomic physics and particle accelerators, the design of which he was involved in for the German government. Not the sort of guy one expects to meet in a Jazz cellar. But strange things have been happening to me ever since I arrived in Poland. (more…)