And I keep forgetting things, in a sort of cheerful post jet-lagged haze. Like posting this, for example, which I wrote yesterday and forgot..
...
I was 22 when I met Kim Newman, and he was 23, and even then much older and wiser than I was, and already on the way to becoming a well-known and well-respected and quite fearless film critic. When people say I'm prolific (I'm not) Kim is the standard I compare myself to: someone who can write a short story or a review or a novel in the time it takes to type it, and who not only can, but does.
We wrote a book together, taking separate halves (he finished his long before I finished mine), and then we wrote dozens of humour articles for sundry magazines, respectable and otherwise (the otherwise paid much better) together and with other writers (mostly the hilarious Eugene Byrne with occasional contributions from Phil Nutman and Stefan Jaworzyn), under the bank account of "The Peace and Love Corporation".
We haven't seen each other or even spoken for years, although the bank account still exists, and contains several pounds, and Eugene, as custodian of the account, emails us both every year and lets us know that it's still there. Our current plan involves not ever taking anything out of the bank account and then, using the miracle of compound interest, in several thousand years' time OWNING THE GALAXY, before being wiped out in the stock market crash of October 3719.
Which is all by way of preamble to me noticing this morning with a certain amount of tredipidation that Kim Newman had reviewed Fragile Things for The Independent, and my subsequent happiness that the review was fundamentally a very good one. (And if you think that knowing Kim for 23 years might have got me a free ride, or even a good review if he didn't actually believe it, well, you don't know Kim Newman.)
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article1888662.ece