Jonathan Gibbs

A starling murmuration over Brighton pier, as seen from the sea.

A starling murmuration over Brighton pier, as seen from the sea. Lots of people lined up along the pier to watch the starlings overhead.

Two pictures from the sea in #Brighton on Wednesday. The beach was packed, and everyone was smiling for the first time in about three months. Went for a swim after work, watched the birds, saw a few friendly faces up there on the pier and cycled home without getting rained on. More of this please.

I love writing on the train, except you can’t try out dialogue out loud.

Just now I need to hear what comedy can be got from saying

“Some *soup*?”

through badly chattering teeth, and that would be a bit weird in the middle of carriage K of the Newcastle train.

If you live in the Gorton and Denton constituency and spoke to a Reform party member on your doorstep or in the streets then I'd like to speak to you for an article. My DMs are open.

Well, the plumber fixed the drip

And probably ninety-four or ninety-five times out of one hundred that you type mothers', you mean mother's.

Thanks! He borrowed it off my shelves but it's one I haven't read. His rucksack was stolen and he says he was really enjoying it but couldn't remember the title or author name.

(He also had my copy of The Ballad of Peckham Rye in his bag, but that's another story.)

Hurrah, thank you!

#Booksky help me solve this mystery. Son was reading a book but it got stolen. 'Scandinavian style author name'. Girl visiting some bloke in his flat (in New York?) and he is paying her to describe items that he gives her (a glove) into a voice recorder. Items belonging to a dead woman. WHAT IS IT?

Books on the tube

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
Wittgenstein’s Nephew by Thomas Bernhard
Invisible Girl by Lisa Jewell
The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides

Books on the tube

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Unidentified NYRB Classic
Murder at the Black Cat Cafe by Seishi Yokomizo
The Echo Chamber by John Boyne
RHS Encyclopedia of Garden Design

Ha! Though Rite of Spring has got to be 15 or 20 shorter than Daphnis and Chloe. And it’s a lot tighter, from memory. (I’m not a fan of Firebird Suite.)

So he dies while he’s asleep? If so, I think that’s a brilliant way of doing it. Presumably, most often when someone dies when they’re awake, it’s visible, so you could narrate the effect of death on their person (collapsing, etc) but if you die in your sleep, there’s often nothing *to* narrate.

The guy playing the fairground Tombola! I admit I didn’t know the piece well enough to appreciate that it was actually a ballet score, but the last five minutes I was just watching the conductor turn the pages, praying for the end.

I’d be interested to hear someone else’s thoughts!

But certainly it’s exciting to hear something I can’t go home and immediately call up again on my streaming platform, or even order to CD. I’ve got to try to keep what I liked about it alive in my head.

(That was my only problem with the Adams: that this was a big orchestra for a Concerto where the piano actually doesn’t have much ‘solo’ material: eight double bases, ten cellos. Too often the piano was smothered. That’s my amateur opinion.)

What on earth is this piece doing in the concert repertoire? It was like listening to a small kid with a Casio keyboard, pressing all the buttons, activating all the settings, just to see what sound they made. An orchestra can make A LOT of different sounds.

I enjoyed hearing Vikingur Ólafsson play John Adams’s Piano Concerto ‘After the Fall’ but the pleasure was pretty much drowned out by the main course of Ravel’s interminable Daphnis and Chloe. It’s a ballet score! Without dancers it’s a reheated modernist soup of romantic tropes. I hated it!

About - A Personal Anthology A weekly guest-editor picks and introduces a personal anthology of twelve favourite short stories. Click to read A Personal Anthology, by Jonathan Gibbs, a Substack publication with thousands of subsc...

It's Wednesday afternoon, it's sunny, it's officially nearly the weekend... and A PERSONAL ANTHOLOGY!

This week's guest editor, picking and introducing a dozen favourite short stories, is @guillermostitch.bsky.social, author of The Coast of Everything and Lake of Urine.

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Yes! Mann's German text originally included untranslated French. First English translation (HT Porter-Loew) kept the French untranslated. More recent (James E Woods) translated the French to English.

bsky.app/profile/jona...

Camilla’s is a proper old skool secondhand bookshop if you like that kind of thing: the basement shelves are so tightly packed you have to browse sideways.

Walk up to Beachy Head from Meads if the weather’s good.

In writing, what is important is not individual expression, but the maintenance of common language as a vital force, fortifying it against the aggregating tendencies of the cultural production that flows in and out of it, and that Gen-AI accelerates. Your 'voice' is a microbe in the gut of language.

If I say to you, “I love your glasses,” it’s pretty fucking likely that I hate your glasses.

Interested in studying Creative Writing at MA level in London? Come along to this free online 'taster session' next Weds 4th March (5.30pm) in which I'll be talking about the counterintuitive plotting of Sally Rooney's novels.

Register here:
www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

The Shreddies gag!

#SmallProphets

IYKYK

A ★★★★★ review of The Secret Agent (2025) Happily I went into this knowing very little beyond what the trailer showed, which was very little beyond the mood and tone: thoroughly 70s in its grainy paranoia - but bright and light and tropical, ...

Last night we went to see The Secret Agent at the BFI. Even looking at the still that Letterboxd has chosen for it makes me feel good – hardly representative of the 'thriller' aspect of the film, but it shows its soul. I *know* these characters, and often from single lines of dialogue.

As others have said: persevere! I read them one a month last year, and in fact #2 was my least favourite. The Acceptance World I liked a lot better, because you see the first patterns returning; and by #5 I was very happy riding the wave of each book, completely in thrall, if also bewildered.

Invite the boss over, and you’ve used the company’s new AI tool to design the entire menu and source the recipes.

Thinking of standard 70s sitcom tropes you just don't see anymore - nobody invites their boss over for dinner these days, do they?

Get your bloody welly off that chair!