Canonette's blog

I have some thoughts about charity, based on my interactions with Andrew and the people who are supposed to help him. I am yet to engage with the Council on Andrew’s behalf, so can’t comment on how they treat him. However, he tells me that they can’t and won’t help him, as he made himself “intentionally homeless”. This phrase lets councils off the hook and means that they no longer have a “duty” of care towards him. I’m sure how it works...

Faber’s latest novel, The Book of Strange New Things , tells the story of a husband and wife, Peter and Beatrice, separated by an unfathomable distance and the consequent strains this puts on their relationship. It is also a work of science fiction or speculative fiction, as the novel’s protagonist is a missionary who travels without his wife to a USIC colony on a different planet. His mission is to minister to the native population of Oasis,...

In Their Own Words is a celebration of the variousness of contemporary poets living and writing in the UK today. 56 poets talk about their own poetic voices and their work. Essential reading for anybody who cares about poetry. In Their Own Words: Contemporary Poets on Their Poetry, Edited by Helen Ivory and George Szirtes I can’t imagine someone who has no interest in poetry even picking this book up, so to say that if you enjoy contemporary...

This week I have mostly been reading dystopian fiction; more specifically The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham and The Death of Grass by John Christopher. I read both novels about thirty years ago, when I was in my mid-teens, and seem to recall that I had borrowed The Death of Grass from the library purely because I liked the title. If my fifteen year old self was reviewing the books, this post would be very different, as my opinion has...

“It was the late 70s. Everyone seemed focused on a sense that we were always at the end of things, that it was all collapsing. London was filthy, semi-functional. The phones didn’t work properly, the tube was a nightmare, but no one complained. It fed into a rather apocalyptic sense of things.” Ian McEwan, The Guardian, 26 January 2014. “The farm is crucial. Stranded in such an isolated place, where there are only the natural rhythms of life and...