Obsessive Compulsive
The peripatetic life of Scotland's foremost writer
Selling off Scotland
- 6 comments
- Posted by AL Kennedy
- 10 November 2008
'I'm amazed that an SNP government would be so intent on turning our country into some kind of heathery play park for the super rich and plausible'
I'm at home. This doesn't happen. I'm never at home. I never have time to look in all my cupboards and dust. (As it turns out, there's quite a lot stored in my dust.) I've been in my own flat for almost two weeks. Good God, this is unheard of and had I not been strapped into my big black typing chair and imaginary places for almost all of this [...]
Begone, financial vampires
- 3 comments
- Posted by A L Kennedy
- 21 October 2008
AL Kennedy is on the move. Pondering the romantic potential of Stockholm Syndrome, she takes time out to wish exile on the moneymen
It was bound to happen – the final twangy bit holding my mental compartments together (or, indeed, apart) was eventually bound to go ping and leave me. I think that happened in Blackpool. Not sure. I have, since we last spoke, been flinging myself into the joys of a writer’s autumn: festivals, festivals and then some touring and more festivals. So Wigtown was followed by Blackpool, by London, by Stockholm, [...]
Noxious vapours
- 4 comments
- Posted by AL Kennedy
- 06 October 2008
Good wishes to those troubled bankers, the perils of sniffing damp repelling liquid and how to touch the arm of strangers and not quite get away with it
Oh, those poor, innocent bankers and traders. Especially at Lloyds/TSB –they didn’t in anyway blight 10 years of my life. I’m sending love to them. I think it’s love – something that makes my ears bleed, anyway.
I’ve spent three days distracting myself from their plight by painting my mother’s house (located in what are now the rice paddies of Warwickshire) with a damp-repelling liquid that comes in an [...]
Locked up with writers
- 2 comments
- Posted by AL Kennedy
- 17 September 2008
No duffers, no loons, they could cook, they were funny and twisted and many of them had nice mums - AL Kennedy on the highs and lows of residential courses
Once again I am hunched in the only office I may ever know – a train - my own lovely home being a distant memory filled with housework and DVD’s I haven’t watched for ages. On this occasion I’m in a Birmingham-bound diesel office which has managed to sneak out of Edinburgh Waverly without being – thus far – stymied by all of the apocalyptic and mysterious things that happen [...]
Speed dating
- 1 comments
- Posted by AL Kennedy
- 02 September 2008
It occurred to me my personal equivalent of speed dating is, in fact, the hotel fire scare. In many ways a group of strangers in damp car park at 3am is an ideal way to meet new chums
I am writing this on a train – to be precise, the train that I had to buy a ticket for when it turned out that the train I had a ticket for didn’t exist as a result of obscure and perhaps satanic influences – or simply because it’s a British train and therefore one small, but highly effective, part of a multi-layered plan to make travelling by public transport [...]
Festival Leprosy
- 0 comments
- Posted by A L Kennedy
- 19 August 2008
Vile diseases and avaricious banks - AL Kennedy finds that Edinburgh's festival season isn't all lollipops and balloons
One of the many interesting chance elements which always enters into the Edinburgh Festival mix, is disease. Not to be too graphic, you spend your semi-waking days watching, or working in various warm, moist venues full of strangers who breathe, cough, giggle, guffaw, sigh, yawn and generally spread the usually very private and intimate contents of their lungs all over the shop, you utilise extremely well-used conveniences (with much less-used [...]
Evil twin?
- 1 comments
- Posted by AL Kennedy
- 05 August 2008
Poor Gordon - perhaps soon to be replaced by one or another Miliband. They’re twins. What happens if we get the evil twin? I’ve watched enough Hammer horror films to know this is surely a risk
Something of an eventful fortnight behind me. The weekend before last I had to pick up the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. This involved flying to Salzburg – cue much head twitching and feeble attempts at self-hypnosis in various bits of Gatwick. Eventually my imagination simply became so exhausted by picturing smiley things and projection screens and giving air gunners encouraging hugs that it could no longer picture my [...]
Train on fire
- 3 comments
- Posted by AL Kennedy
- 23 July 2008
The attitude on arriving late at Latitude and the perils of reading AL Kennedy. Scotland's foremost writer on life, October love and preparing for Edinburgh
I’m sure you’ve already guessed this – the most stylish possible way to arrive at a summer festival is on board a burning train. So my trip to Latitude was pretty much perfect. As the smoke billowed, we were detained at Berwick for more than an hour. This was “…due to the driver carrying out safety checks.” As matters progressed, we learned that a) train announcements will always avoid mentioning [...]
Perfect arse
- 2 comments
- Posted by AL Kennedy
- 07 July 2008
Life offers joys to appreciate. For instance, only the other day, a gentleman wearing a Star Wars Storm trooper mask showed me his bottom...
Dear readers, allow me to announce that I have actually finished a short story. After weeks of nonsense, distractions, train trips and psychotic breaks I really, truly did manage to cobble together enough minutes to put one word after another for 22 of your earth pages and there it is – probably ugly and deeply flawed, but a story nonetheless.
In many ways, in fact, quite a dandy fortnight has [...]
Lost in Brussels
- 4 comments
- Posted by AL Kennedy
- 20 June 2008
AL Kennedy on the perils of visiting Brussels, how to spot the British amidst a foreign crowd and on talking football in German when you don't understand it in English
Sadly, I missed getting hit on the head by police batons at the anti-Bush protests. (Why is it - and I’m asking seriously – that police are so very suggestible ? Dress them in riot gear and they do like to bust things up. Mix them with US enforcement and they get all Vietnam on your ass.) And, as we know, the police usually try to bully crowds if they [...]
Stunned as a drug mule
- 3 comments
- Posted by AL Kennedy
- 05 June 2008
My eyelid spasm seems to have cleared up, my noddy head tick is abating and I now have only the dearlordspareme head shaking manoeuvre. AL Kennedy goes on tour...
Okay, if a B&B shower has a switch and two dials, would you also expect a toggle? – a secret, unfindable toggle? - to be involved in producing hot water and therefore preventing hypothermia and/or trench foot? I’m just asking – nothing to with my life, or the fact that I can have no sensation below the knee.
Dear reader, what can I say ? It’s been a busy fortnight. [...]
Elongated spasms
- 1 comments
- Posted by AL Kennedy
- 19 May 2008
This week, AL Kennedy composes begging letters and officiates at a showbiz wedding
Well, I’m still alive. I think. A combination of stress and research now means that I’ve developed a wibbly eyelid and two different head ticks. I think the eyelid annoys only me, but the head ticks are a bit much for the general public. The main one involves my head shaking itself in a perfectly understandable ohpleaseno kind of motion. I’ve tried to adjust this into a more positive yeswhynotifIhaveto [...]
Hitting myself with a rat
- 0 comments
- Posted by AL Kennedy
- 08 May 2008
From infectious hotels to her favourite power tools - Scottish writer and comedian AL Kennedy's brilliant new column for newstatesman.com
Since winning the Costa Prize for my last novel, Day (which I’m assuming was a nice thing) my life has turned into shrapnel and I spend most of my days replying to emails from strangers who want something, slinging huge amounts of snailmail into the recycling bin and running up and down my nearest high street in flight from more of the same.
The only thing working efficiently is [...]
