I went to the TKTS ticket booth for half-price theatre tickets on Saturday and ended up buying tickets to Blackbird for myself, my boyfriend and our friend from New York. The play by David Harrower debuted at the Edinburgh Festival last year and this was the final night of its run at the Albery Theatre [...]

Over seventy per cent of the authors on my list are male and I think this is a flaw in the list. I don’t believe in quotas and I am not going to deliberately make the list fifty-fifty as the books have to make it on their own merits. However, there is the counter argument [...]

There’s been plenty going on. I’m still pretty busy with work, clearing deadlines and I have a few shifts this week as well. We have friends from New York in town so spending time with them has been a priority. Plus we leave for Italy on Sunday so we’ve got to book accommodation and so [...]

I’m the procrastination queen, which I guess is a bit of an occupational hazard when you’re a freelance journalist but a fatal one if you’re trying to keep food on the table and a roof over your head. I really need to finish writing my piece on Uganda while it’s fresh in my mind and [...]

In less than two weeks time, my boyfriend and I are off to Italy for a holiday. I can hardly wait! It will be our first time in Italy but if it’s as good as everyone says it is, it surely won’t be our last. We have two weeks (slightly less when you exclude the [...]

It fined up Sunday afternoon so I did the first half of the street skate, up past Regent’s Park to Maida Vale (route and photos). The first part seemed really cruisy but it was much harder once we hit a long straight stretch past Regent’s Park and had to hightail it so we didn’t block [...]

We saw The Squid and the Whale at the cinema last night. It’s an indie movie about the break-up of a family in 1986 Brooklyn and its effect on Walt, who’s sixteeen, and Frank, who’s twelve. The father, Bernard, is a pompous English professor and writer past his prime and the mother, Joan, is an [...]

I love my new StatCounter tool. I installed it a few days ago but it’s invisible so you won’t see it (the counter on the right is from a different website and it doesn’t give me any details). StatCounter lets me see where my readers are coming from, what they’ve looked at, how they got [...]

There are quite a few people who have worked at The Australian and now live in London and we have been getting together for drinks every few months. We’ve met in a wine bar in London Bridge, a dim sum place in Shoreditch and last night went to a gastropub in Farringdon (the Peasant and [...]

I have been waiting for almost a month for a parcel from Australia to arrive. It left Australia before Easter and I have been getting increasingly anxious because it contains valuables. My fears were confirmed this morning when Royal Mail told me that the parcel had officially gone missing. It left Australia on 12 April, [...]