Not The Day Job

Tech journalist by day, this is where I keep my food writing & SF journalism...

For several years I wrote book reviews and conducted interviews for SFX magazine, starting with the Iain Banks interview in the very first issue. If you've seen the publicity photograph showing Iain poised at a cast iron gate, about to walk away, that was taken at the every end of the day after the photographer had kept us on top of Colton Hill in the howling wind for the whole interview and kept begging for one last shot. Courteous to the end, Iain stopped one last time and then strode away. I also wrote the programme notes for the Newcastle Playhouse production of The Wasp Factory. Despite having known him for many years, I still haven't managed to persuade anyone to have me interview Bryan Talbot.

I was a founder member of an APA called CHEFF (Cooks, Hedonists, Epicures, Foodies and Fetishists - and having been taught the meaning of fetishism at an early age by Neil Gaiman, with the aid of a brand new black leather jacket, I count myself all five of those.

My contributions for CHEFF don't really have recipes in, although there are plenty of dishes that you could cook as long as you have what I think of as 'cooking common sense' - which means you don't need me to tell you how many potatoes you need to feed three people and you can decide how much wine to put in the casserole for yourself.

If it's recipes with measurements you're looking for, you'll find some of mine in both the first and second editions of the Callahan's Cookbook, compiled by DM from alt.callahans. Sadly neither Mary MerryTail nor Ignatz manage to drop by the bar very often these days, but if you remember us from The Place, sink a toast for us.

I wrote a number of pieces for the now-defunct AboutFood site and I reviewed various items of kitchen equipment for Amazon UK. Incidentally, several of my pieces from CHEFF include references to food sensitivities which I no longer experience.