pick a street and go for a ride;

You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up in your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That’s the real obsession. All those stories.

- The Things They Carried; Tim O’Brien

Strangely, I didn’t get a thing written this weekend. Instead I took a lot of photographs (how many of them turned out I don’t know, because some of them are on film!), and read, and dreamed dreams, and nursed hangovers, and went on adventures. For the five hours on the bus to and back from St Andrews yesterday I immersed myself in political intrigue through the “sequel”, for want of a better term, to All The President’s Men, but the rest of this weekend was spent with a very different book.

The Things They Carried is ostensibly a war story, or a collection of war stories, and so not normally the sort of thing I would pick up, but my American BFF’s glowing recommendation swayed me. Blurring the line between memoir and fiction the book is visceral, raw and stunning – in the truest sense of the word. O’Brien’s skill with language captures the horror, drama and humour of Vietnam as brutal, beautiful poetry.

If I Die In A Combat Zone is next on my to-read pile.

I’ve watched a fair bit of TV this weekend I suppose – Red Dwarf and Doctor Who included of course, but I don’t have much of an opinion on either. If anything, I resented my old favourites for getting in the way of my binging on what I had left of Bryan Fuller’s Wonderfalls. My love of Fuller’s Pushing Daisies is well-documented at this point (indeed, if our train to Wolverhampton on Friday night doesn’t get me to the hotel in enough time for ITV’s premiere of 2×11 – an episode which hasn’t aired in the US yet! – I will be gutted), and I can’t help but suspect the man sneaks crack into his shows. How else to explain the seven episodes I consumed in two days at the weekend? Well, other than the Bombay Sapphire hangover keeping me from moving from the sofa?

Okay, by “crack” I mean cute boys. Plus, her prickliness and cynicism make Jaye Tyler a more interesting heroine than a girl named Chuck. I’m currently trying to get my hands on Fuller’s other show, Dead Like Me, which I have been assured is even better.