“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”


DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little, Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out In Wonderland ... Winner: Booker prize; Whitbread prize; Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize; James Joyce Award from the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin)


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26 March 2017

ANOTHER SHARD OF EAST END HISTORY

Exeter publican Nick Binns with helper Gabriella Bertocci in 1995 ... photo Victoria Straub - East End Diary '96 (Wakefield Press) ... Gabs was chill gothmother cool to a wave of hungry losties ... she wasn't too big on, shall we say, unwarranted optimism ... below is the Parliamentary record of the Grievance Debate speech of the Hon Patrick Conlon MP, Minister for Police, to complain of Nick's retirement. 

The Ex has since been in the very calm hands of Kevin Greg Esq. 
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Having spotted me scrivening: a  pleasant stranger reading my poems on Annabelle Collett's mosaic Xtables at the front of the Ex ... during Nick's time the Licensing Court judge agreed in extending the trading hours that discourse as commonly found and encouraged in the front bar, was in itself an important tourism attraction.  

That was not at all an accidental breakthrough, as Nick had assembled a gang of witnesses so formidable, just from the corner of the bar closest the door, that the most recalcitrant brain could not fail to pick up a quick morning of light down the courthouse.

Like this wee snug: that wall: if you're not there you're nowhere:  
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