Random Scribblings in the Margin

Dammit, 27 Club, keep your grasping claws off my favourite musicians!

Amy Winehouse has just died. Circumstances are so far unclear but not, I suspect, unpredictable.

Fuck it, I liked her. As a singer, not as an interesting car crash. 'In My Bed', 'You Send Me Flying', 'Amy, Amy, Amy', 'Rehab', 'You Know I'm No Good' - some of my favourite songs. Her cover of 'Valerie' was way better than the Zutons' original. I love me some raunchy blues-rock, and she had a great voice and great presence. And I never got to see her live.

What kind of fuckery is this?

Damn it, Dick King-Smith's dead.

When I was a kid, I liked books and I liked animals. I was painfully shy, so I didn't like people. Dick King-Smith wrote a huge number of kids' books about animals. You see how he might've been a massive part of my childhood.

I read The Sheep-Pig and Saddlebottom and The Hodgeheg and King Max the Last and Pets for Keeps and Sophie's Tom and Martin's Mice. All or most were published by Young Puffin, I think.

I mean, he was 88. But damn it.