A few weeks ago I headed up to Stoke Newington on my new bicycle (a rather fetching Raleigh Sapphire) to check out the first ever Stoke Newington Literary Festival.

In some ways, it’s a surprise that Stoke Newington didn’t already have a lit fest of its own: it makes the ideal location for literary events. Stoke Newington Church Street is replete with kooky cafes perfect for reading paperbacks and drinking coffee; it has an independent bookshop, and a spooky graveyard (the fabulous Abney Park) with a ruined church that’s straight out of a Victorian ghost story; and it also has a long history of connections with literary figures and radical thinkers – past residents have included Daniel Defoe (who even has a pub named after him), Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Wollstonecraft.

The programme for this first festival was certainly diverse, incorporating everyone from A.C Grayling to Tony Benn, and covering topics ranging from feminism through to guerrilla gardening. On Saturday afternoon, I went along to an event featuring two of Britain’s leading science fiction writers in conversation – China Mieville (swoon!) and John Courtenay Grimwood – which took place at Stoke Newington’s Assembly Rooms, under the rather incongruous sparkle of an enormous glitter ball. Although holding the event without a chair to direct the conversation meant that discussion felt quite unstructured, this was a genuinely fascinating event – entertaining, thought-provoking and inspiring.

Then on Sunday afternoon, after a picnic in Abney Park, I went along to one of the festival's headline events - Hackney resident Iain Sinclair talking to Andy Beckett, author of When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies. Unsurprisingly there was much discussion of London on the agenda, and the localities of Stoke Newington and Hackney in particular, but the tone was far from self-congratulatory: Sinclair brought a good serving of local controversy to the table (see the full story of the cancellation of his book launch at Stoke Newington library here and here), and there were also entertaining readings on offer from both writers.

Altogether, a pretty good start for Stoke Newington's first ever literary festival - and the beer was tasty too! Check out the review in the Times here.

[Image by louisathomson used via Creative Commons]

As a long-time diary aficionado, I couldn't resist the chance to take a peep at Ctrl.Alt.Shift's Dear Diary, which ran for two weeks in May at Super Superficial's Gallery 7.

In a little room in the basement of a Covent Garden shop, this tiny exhibition offered up a selection of written and audio diaries from young people from all over the world, ranging from the visual journals of Dan Eldon, a young photojournalist who was killed on the front line by an angry mob in Mogadishu at the age of 22, to musings from Kurt Cobain, Anais Nin and Sylvia Plath. Extracts written by teenage Kenyans living in a context of extreme poverty, violence and political instability were side-by-side with the unpublished diaries of ordinary British people, collected by the British Library's Irving Finkel. A comfy chair in the corner provided a space to browse a bookshelf of famous diaries and journals, and to jot down your own diary entry to add to the selection on offer.

The exhibition was complemented by an aptly-named event, Cringe at Hoxton Hall, which saw the theatre transformed into an 80s-style teenage bedroom complete with pin-up posters and The Breakfast Club playing on a TV screen. Readers from Henry Holland to Brett Anderson read extracts from their own or others' diaries seated on a bed strewn with copies of Just Seventeen, Smash Hits and Jackie, accompanied by music from Jodie Harsh and Matt Horne. As a part of the project, Ctrl.Alt.Shift have also launched a limited-edition diary, with a cover illustrated by Alexa Chung and featuring extracts from Courtney Love, Daniel Johnson and Anais Nin, with all proceeds going towards work with young people from the slums of Nairobi.

Blending the entertainingly kitsch and toe-curlingly self-indulgent with some serious questions about how diaries of all kinds help young people to deal with even the most traumatic experiences, and resonating with Ctrl.Alt.Shift's wider purpose as a movement fighting social and global injustice, Dear Diary was an enjoyable and sometimes thought-provoking little show. However I was left feeling that this was really just the tip of the iceberg - for me at least, this fascinating and rich literary form has lots of interesting depths still to be explored.

I'm celebrating the joy of finally having the internet at home* with a quick post about something else that frequently makes my day better: Art on the Underground.

The London Underground has been commissioning and displaying works by artists for over a century, from Man Ray and Edward McKnight Kauffer right up to Yoshimoto Nara, Mark Titchner and David Shrigley; however, since 2000, Art on the Underground has been working to extend this tradition, working with artists on a contemporary art programme that takes in everything from station-sized installations to community projects to artwork for the Tube map (the current map cover was designed by Richard Long), with the aim of improving the daily journeys of millions of London commuters.

Some of my favourites amongst the recent artworks they have commissioned include Underground Heroes - a project bringing together artist David Blandy and young people and staff from Fairbridge in London's Kennington Centre. Inspired by Blandy's interest in Japanese movies, manga and gaming, as well as the notion of the alter-ego, this project enabled each young person involved to create their own comic book superhero persona for a series of portrait photographs at the entrance to Charing Cross station, as seen in the images above. The young people also came up with a series of heroic adventures, transformed into a trail of comic strips at Embankment station by illustrator Inko.



Meanwhile, Jeremy Deller has created a work of art for Tube drivers: a booklet of quotes entitled What is the city but the people? was given to operational staff on the Piccadilly line in February 2009. Staff were encouraged to use the quotes in their daily communication with customers, with the idea of building a more positive atmosphere during the rush hour and enlivening millions of journeys with an element of unexpected humour. Deller said: "I often wish announcements were more personal and reflected the realities and absurdities of living and working in a big city. I think the travelling public enjoys some humour and unexpected insight during their journey." The quotations have also been transformed into posters: one of my favourites, which I used to see daily at Kings Cross station, is Gandhi's observation "There is more to life than simply increasing its speed".

As artist-in-residence at Southwark Underground station, Peter McDonald brings vibrant colour to the urban environment. Paintings on billboards transform the public space into an everyday art gallery, whilst staff and customers are offered badges to wear that represent the daily life and work of the station.


Finally, writer Sarah Butler has recently been commissioned to undertake a six-month residency on the Central Line, engaging and collaborating with London Underground staff to create new writing. Staff in Central Line stations from West Ruislip to Epping worked closely with Sarah, telling stories, introducing colleagues and sharing memories. The result is Central Line Stories: a glimpse into the intriguing unseen aspects of a journey on the Central Line which I certainly enjoyed - perhaps especially because of its connections to my recent piece, A Northern Line, in Flax's Mostly Truthful anthology.

Whatever you make of the individual works themselves, there's no doubt that these interventions certainly brighten and break the monotony of the oh-so tedious daily commute. Keep your eyes open for new artworks across the London Underground or find out more about what's coming soon the Art on the Underground website here.

*The internet at last works but the unfortunately the wireless does not, so I can only go online if I lie down on the living room floor... convenient!

[Photograph by Aaron Bikari used under a Creative Commons License; Artworks by David Blandy and Peter McDonald via Art on the Underground]

I'm currently intrigued by the buzz around The Cutting Room Experiment. This unique new project is “an attempt to create the world’s biggest user generated event in the world.” Taking place right here in Manchester on 20 June, it’s going to transform Cutting Room, a new public space in Ancoats, into a unique events space for a one-day, one-off “mass participation event” which the audience themselves will design and shape.

By logging on the interactive website here, anyone can submit ideas for events themed around everything from art, design and architecture through to music and film: once they are submitted, people can vote for the ideas they like best, and the twelve most popular events will make up the programme on 20 June. There isn’t much time left to suggest or vote for ideas though: this Friday 29 May is the deadline for idea generation and voting, and the final line-up for the “experiment” will be announced next week!

It looks likely to be an entertaining day: ideas already submitted range from space-hopper racing to lego art to guerilla knitting to experiments in relay film-making to a mass performance of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. I’m particularly looking forward to finding out which of the literature events will take place on the day: will it be writing a collaborative novel, enacting Where’s Wally? around Ancoats, or (my personal favourite) fancy dress, Pride and Prejudice-meets-zombies stylee? Who knows what will happen - but there's no doubt it's going to be an interesting one - Ancoats may never be the same again! Check out the website here to find out more more.

It's been all quiet on the western front recently, but that's mainly because I've been busy. Amongst other things, last week I went along to the Buy Art Fair at Urbis. I also took in the preview events for this year's Manchester Literature Festival: Lucky Voice at Tiger Tiger, where poets Patience Agababi, Caroline Bird and John McAuliffe celebrated National Poetry Day karaoke-style; and an audience with Anita Shreve at Dancehouse. And in addition, I went up to Lancaster for the weekend, where I narrowly escaped being poisoned by some dumplings - though that, as they say, is really quite another story.

Today I was over in Liverpool for the North West Independent Publishers' Showcase, which is just one of the many events making up the new Chapter & Verse literature festival at the Bluecoat. It was great to see so many of the region's independent presses and literary magazines represented there, taking in everything from local history to radical poetry. I also enjoyed a varied selection of readings from a number of the writers they have published including Dominic Berry, John Redmond, Michael Carson and Rebecca Goss.

Tomorrow, of course, will be the first day of Manchester Literature Festival, complete with the Manchester Poetry Prize Gala in the evening. Today (when I wasn't enjoying new writing and publishing, of course) I found myself wondering what exactly one wears to a poetry gala. I had a brief flirtation with buying a pair of leopard print tights I saw in Topshop, which I thought might go with my favourite black dress, but then the doubt swept in. Could I really pull off leopard print tights or was it going to be a point-and-snigger situation? Were leopard print tights the kind of thing one really wears to a poetry gala? What shoes would go with them? And was £9.00 just a ridiculous amount of money to pay for tights, leopard print or otherwise? The questions were piling up, Carrie Bradshaw-style. In the end, I came home on the train with boring grey tights - 2 pairs for £4.99 - and no idea what to wear tomorrow night. Tights? Leopard print? What do we think? If anyone out there in the aether has a solution to my sartorial dilemma, I'd actually love to hear it.

But actually, the best thing that happened to me today didn't have anything to do with writing, literature or publishing, or even, as it happens, anything to do with tights. For various boring cancellation-related reasons, I ended up getting the train from East Didsbury to Manchester Airport this morning, and then catching a train on from there to Liverpool Lime Street. Whilst I was waiting for the train to Liverpool in the rather depressing waiting room at Manchester Airport, a sudden movement caught my eye, and I noticed a sparrow hopping around my feet, pecking hopefully at invisible crumbs. I felt a bit concerned about the sparrow: I wasn't sure how it had got into the waiting room, or how it was going to get back out through the automatic doors; but then suddenly I realised that there was actually a whole family of sparrows inside the waiting room. They were everywhere - lined up in a row on the beams in the roof, flitting from table to table cheeping to each other, perched on the back of a chair whilst scrutinising a man eating a Danish pastry. They were quite obviously having a great time. None of the other people in the waiting room (mostly cross-looking commuters, or people who were miserable because they had come back from holidays in the sun to damp, cold Manchester in October) seemed to notice the sparrows at all - even the man with the Danish pastry completely ignored them in spite of their best efforts to charm him into sharing his crumbs - but I sat there very happily watching them for about 20 minutes. I felt as if I had been unexpectedly transported to some tropical paradise where exotic hummingbirds might fly in and out or perch on the table, except of course that everyone looked colder and crosser than they probably would have done in a tropical paradise. But the sparrows were still the highlight of my day.

Lovely sparrow photograph by Rob Wallace via Creative Commons