I got drenched running from Bethnall Green tube station to the Broadway Bookshop in Hackney, arrived an hour early for the event, and sat dripping into a plate of quinoa and falafel, earwigging a conversation between two guys who wondered whether the waiter was omniscient or omnipresent (I think surly would have been a more appropriate adjective).
The event was organised by Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone. I read a new short story called If dead fish could blink, which was commissioned for Sheffield Hallam’s annual anthology Matter – out later this year ( it will also feature a new story from Alison MacLeod, and a foreword by Maggie Gee).
Colleen Becker and Melissa Bailey read from novels in progress, which both sounded exciting, and Richard Tyrone Jones read one of the funniest shorts I’ve ever heard – The day everyone in the world’s arseholes disappeared.
I got back to Kings Cross station early and went for a wander round St Pancras – I love St Pancras station. Everything there is so shiny it’s like walking five minutes into the future. I hope though that in the real future, it will be possible to find a pint of Guinness at 11pm, which it wasn’t on Tuesday. I had a chocolate shake instead. In the train on the way home, a girl was singing the opening fanfare of the lion king, just the first four seconds, over and over again. Hakuna Matata.
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