Ray Newman

When did the game of darts become associated with pubs? We all know that in the UK if you want to play darts you head to the pub. But where did this association between pubs and darts begin?

BLOG POST: Dartboards and pubs go together, everyone knows that. But how long has that been the case? And, actually, how old is darts as a game? 🍺🍻

boakandbailey.com/2026/03/when...

Screenshot from the Letterboxd app showing three lists of films that use London Calling to indicate a scene in London, including Get Him To The Greek, The Conjuring 2, Die Another Day and more

There's at least three Letterboxd lists for this and I'd forgotten that even *Bond* did it. Horrifying.

I watched a French movie today where the main characters had one small scene set in London and that scene opened to the sound of London's Calling by the Clash. Lazy movie tropes - the one thing that unites us across all international borders.

“We can't claim Our Nicole™ solely for horror, but she has done enough work in the genre for her to rate an important mention...”

Claire Trevor in Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)

“Well you gotta live, no matter what happens.”

My favourite line in movies – a film and a scene I return to endlessly, an idea that echoes in my brain.

Spoken by Claire Trevor, born 116 years ago today. (Written by Dudley Nichols.)

No, some version from the 1960s, possibly on Sue Records, so maybe Ike Turner?

In the pub this afternoon, a DJ played a version of Stagger Lee. What are the chances, etc.

Black and white photo. A row of 15th century thatched granite almshouses line one side of a narrow street - small terraced cottages the other in thick fog. Double yellow lines on both sides lead off into the murk beyond.

White zig-zag road markings on an empty road with skeletal trees along one side. A wonky lamppost. Thick fog.

A street of old lopsided buildings - a stark granite facade with bricked up doorway and windows in the foreground - leading off into thick fog.

Black and white photo. A grassy path leads to a gate in a hedge. Murky fog beyond and faint silhouetted buildings.

From our evening dog walk around town.

A proper Dartmoor pea-souper out there right now... the sort of weather that leaches the colour out of everything.

YouTube video by BBC Archive 1976: The Faking of the Crown Jewels | Look Stranger | BBC Archive

In Neal's Yard, Covent Garden, was a small workshop where three craftspeople made fake versions of the Crown Jewels, over and over again, for decades: “Between them Bess and Charlie can turn out an Imperial State in a fortnight...”

youtu.be/LQBvjf3U8G4?...

Script written, artwork made. I just need to record and mix the blighter.

Coming soon, series 6 of Listen with Other: Esprit de Corpse, a story of a team-building exercise that has... unintended consequences. listenwithother.co.uk

Me, with a paper bag on my head. I've drawn an anxious face on it and used bits of yellow paper for teeth.

Visited a paper bag exhibition then went to a paper bag mask workshop.

The state of Neptune surrounded by cocky looking schoolboys in Victorian clothing. They're really facing up to the camera. You can see from the buildings behind what a grand city Bristol was before the Blitz.

It was a drinking fountain. Look at these mischievous lads c.1900!

A rather impressive statue of Neptune on a plinth, surrounded by beautiful Victorian buildings, and black out lamps to stop people driving into him.

Neptune at the junction of Victoria and Temple streets, Bristol, in 1941, via the excellent Know Your Place website.

maps.bristol.gov.uk/kyp/

Fact. The screwdriver that tightens the arms of spectacles is only available inside Christmas crackers. Opticians have to pull dozens of crackers to get the tools of their trade, and if you look out the back at Specsavers, you’ll find bins full of wire puzzles, hair bobbles and fortune telling fish.

A small and very pitted menhir stands on a patch of carefully mown grass. Card behind are queuing for petrol or parked beside a new wooden chalet/lodge. The stone itself is shaped like the number 1 and pitted like pumice. You could fit your hand into the largest hole.

The Tibblestone, an ancient pitted stone on a crossroads near Tewkesbury on a garage forecourt. Lost and found buried by a gardener in 1948. One of Gloucestershire’s very few standing stones. #StandingStoneSunday #UrbanPrehistory

It has been assessed by my Story Viability Team and rejected.

“‘Stagolee’ and ‘Ollie Jackson’ were ballads of Black men who had shot down rivals for seemingly trivial reasons in the same man’s saloon within six years of each other. The two characters were, in a sense, vying to occupy the same folkloric space... there wasn’t room enough for both of them.”

‘Bill Hsu presents … High Anxiety: tense, dark films from 2010-2019 (for fans of Robert Aickman and Brian Evenson)’ (via @johncoulthart.com)

denniscooperblog.com/bill-hsu-pre...

I dreamt I met a man who went undercover at a parcel delivery firm for a documentary, then the TV production company went bust, so that became his real job which he'd been stuck doing for 20 years.

Two goats sheltering from the rain in a graffiti covered concrete ammunition store. Like all goats, they look enigmatic, as if they're plotting something.

The excellent goats whose job is to keep the vegetation down around the remains of the World War II anti-aircraft gun station on Purdown in Bristol.

All my books are in first person present tense because you're actually playing Sad Bastard Simulator, where you play as the titular Sad Bastard.

Michael DeForge: horror is a genre that forces us to confront unsettling and upsetting questions about ourselves and the world we live in -for instance, "what if you saw a weird face" or "what if there was a guy standing there"

Ref.

My other half, playing Stardew Valley, not really watching: “Japanese horror films ask upsetting and unsettling questions like: what if a thing had vocal fry?”

A poster for the film with a black-eyed woman, mouth open, reaching out to the camera.

Now watching: ‘Ju-On: The Grudge 2’, dir. Takashi Shimizu, 2003. 🎬🎥

Any discussion of Claude being sentient is just silly. Now, I would say that there’s a case to be made that Teams is proactively malevolent…

I saw The Black Tower for the first time after I'd written Modern Buildings in Wessex and thought, oh, yes, same thing. I've got another story on my to-write list which is an explicit homage to TBT.

A World I Recognise BBC sitcoms Detectorists and This Country do something previously rarely seen on TV: they capture the England in the cracks between cities. Too often fictional portrayals of small towns and village…

On worlds I recognise, from 2018:

precastreinforced.co.uk/2018/03/09/a...

Having been rationing the episodes I've just finished watching ‘Small Prophets’ and I thought it was excellent. A perfect balance of funny/sweet and weird/dark, set in a world of underpasses, cul-de-sacs and retail parks that is very real and recognisable.

No, very helpful, and this is what I'm trying to learn, I think. You can write something down without showing it to anybody else, or without it mattering. It's the experience and the writing that matters in its own right.