"Uncommon People" is coming out in paperback and I'm Very Nearly On Tour

The paperback of “Uncommon People” comes out at the beginning of April. In the upcoming weeks I’m out and about talking about this book, the earlier “Never A Dull Moment” and whatever else comes up all over the country and overseas. Please come along if I’m in the area.
March 6th, London. Talking about podcasting at an event organised by the @BSME. This is probably just for magazine people but in any case details are at http://www.bsme.com/march-event.
March 7th, Ipswich. Talking to the Suffolk Book League.
April 4th, Stoke Newington. Talking at Soundstage. Details at http://www.soundstage.thespace.uk.com/index.html.
April 9th, Islington. At Word In Your Ear with Mark Ellen and a very special guest. Details soon. Join the mailing list at wiyelondon.com to be sure you don't miss out.
April 14th. Speaking at @journalismfest in Perugia, Italy.
April 17th, 18th, 19th, Yorkshire. Speaking at events in God's Own Country. Details soon.
May 1st, Islington. At Word In Your Ear with Mark Ellen and another amazing guest.
May 2nd, London. Doing whatever's required – telling stories, collecting glasses, selling copies of the War Cry – at The Wanstead Tap.
May 5th, Belfast. Speaking at The Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival.
May 12-13th. Guernsey. Speaking at Guernsey Literary Festival.
May 20th. Bath. Speaking at Bath Festivals.
There's also a series of Johnnie Walker's Long Players going out at the moment on Monday nights at ten on BBC Radio 2.
Any queries about appearances, publicity opportunities, vacant soap boxes to Sally Wray at Transworld Book-Publishers.

The Peace and Love generation were raised on War and Hate

I just saw a presentation from VSC, the people who regulate and rate the video games industry. This gave us a glimpse of the kind of things that will get you an 18 rating. It was quite brief but the thought did cross my mind that somebody in the room might faint. If you're not used to seeing digital heads being cut off it can come as a shock. I'm certainly not used to it. I've never gone in for video games myself and the kids were never big on them so it's a world I know very little about.

It caused me to reflect upon the fact that my generation of baby boomers grew up with unfettered access to every possible variety of war toy: tin guns, rubber knives, home-made bows and arrows and even catapults given as birthday gifts by indulgent uncles. We read War Picture Library comics in which beefy sergeants with enormous fists would take out whole platoons of stormtroopers with just one swipe of their mighty arms. All the films we watched were war films. We couldn't have been exposed to more violence.

And yet we were the generation who grew up to lace daisies in each other's hair and embrace, on the surface at least, the hippie ethos. The Peace and Love generation were raised on War and Hate.

One of the best books I've ever read

I've been reading The Warmth Of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.

It's the story of the Great Migration of black Americans from the South to the North and West told through the lives of three people.

There's Ida Mae Gladney, the wife of a sharecropper who leaves Mississippi in the 1930s after a family member is almost beaten to death by a white man over the disappearance of a turkey, and begins a new life in Chicago.

There's George Swanson Starling who gets out of Florida one step ahead of a lynch mob, moves to New York and then spends his life working the trains that conveyed millions of people between the New world and the Old.

Finally there's Robert Pershing Foster, a doctor who marries into the coloured aristocracy of Georgia but has to head out to the West Coast to escape the shadow of his father in law.

It's not a standard account of a journey from darkness to light. In fact the journey was from a life that was unbearable but simple to a life that was tolerable but increasingly difficult to negotiate.

If, like me, you've grown up absorbing ideas about the Great Migration through references to it in music, reading this opens up a whole world you never guessed at.

Every night when I put it down I said to myself "this is one of the best books I've ever read".