I’ve just started a creative writing course at City University, slap bang between New Labour trendy Islington and genuinely trendy Clerkenwell. It promises to be a very good course. We were told of the illustrious achievements of previous students, who have novels in various stages of publication and many of whom have agents. There are 14 students on the course and they seem a fantastically varied and friendly bunch. One of the many things the tutor encouraged us to do was keep an eye on the ‘News in Brief’ stories in the papers as sources of inspiration. This put me in mind of this bizarre story that I found on the Sun’s website (via Google News I hasten to add). I quite liked this as it lends credibility to an idea I’d had before for one of the climatic scenes in the plot of my putative novel. (I don’t think I’d stretch the reader’s credulity to say that the character was a poet who’d previously eulogised the husband in question. But truth is stranger than fiction.
Beer and sport and pubs and poetry is all a Mackle needs
The Sun you read it so we don’t have to.