These blogs are sneaky little things, and give you all kinds of interesting statistics behind the scenes. For instance, if anyone comes to this site as a direct result of using Google, I can find out exactly what phrase they put into Google to get here.

Usually it’s nothing devastatingly interestingly, but the results from the other morning morning made me laugh so loud that hot chocolate came down my nose. This is what people had been putting into Google early on Tuesday to find this site…

There’s clearly a gap in the market, and if the book doesn’t sell then it’s a gap I intend to fill. That’s right… I’ll go into business making fluffy Alan Garner dolls.

Euan Thorneycroft, by the way, is my agent. He’s delighted that he’s building such a dedicated fanbase, especially amongst the kind of people that like dressing up in big woolly dog costumes for humans.

Amazingly, I’ve got something approaching a quiet day today. This is what I need to do with it, in this order…

1. Cut the knee-high grass in the garden.
2. Remove the periscope from the dog.
3. Wash some clothes.
4. Watch ‘The Owl Service’.

The Owl Service arrived on DVD last week, and I’ve still got a few episodes left to watch. It’s amazing - I fell in love with Alan Garner’s books when I was 11, and Mr Millward read ‘The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen’ to us at school. He even made his moustache quiver when he read Cadellin Silverbrow’s lines. The Owl Service was adapted for TV in 1969, and it’s incredibly evocative and slightly unsettling. It’s also surprisingly kinky for a ‘kids’s show’ - there are endless shots of bare, mini-skirted legs being provocatively crossed, and smouldering eye-shadowed glances from beneath tumbling locks of hair.

And that’s just from Edwin Richfield.

Ho ho!

Well, I’ve had a very strange and wonderful weekend. I went down to Legend, the Robin Of Sherwood convention, on Saturday - proudly letting 150 people in medieval tabards and chain mail loose on Nottingham city centre. And Nottingham city centre, commendably, didn’t bat an eyelid.

I’d toyed with the idea of taking the Cursed Robin Of Sherwood dolls with me, and in the end came up with a compromise. I won them in the charity auction at the same event in 2006, and since then they’ve blighted my life - they’ve destroyed two cars, one PC, a broadband modem and a shelf. I didn’t want to release them all from their imprisonment at the back of the spare room cupboard, but I temporarily liberated Nasir and placed him in secure storage - in a tightly-sealed container whose previous prisoners had included a selection of Spearmint-flavoured dog chews. In fact, here he is, in his bondage…

Don’t look into his eyes!

Anyway, I took him with me and read out a few extracts from the book to a really nice crowd. I was utterly terrified, but they laughed in all the right places, stayed quiet in all the right places, and even Kate - the lovely tarot card reader that I described as being Irish with green eyes when in fact she’s Scottish with blue eyes - didn’t seem to mind too much. Thanks, Kate!

What nearly put me off my stride, though, was halfway through when I noticed Richard Carpenter enter the room. Richard’s one of my writing heroes - not only did he create Robin Of Sherwood, but he’s also responsible for Catweazle. Catweazle! I still watch it on DVD, and I want a little non-cursed woolly Geoffrey Bayldon for my next dog chew jar. So it was a bit disconcerting when I realised Richard was going to hear me reading the bit about being hit in the testicles with a big stick by my best friend Doug Simpson. We were 11 at the time, and pretending to be Friar Tuck and Little John.

But he was laughing! He was! Richard Carpenter was laughing at my jokes. And afterwards, I queued up to get Nasir’s jar signed by him, and his lovely wife Annabelle ‘Mad Mab’ Lee and - bestill my beating heart - Mark Ryan, who played Nasir himself. And the esteemed Mr C told me that he’d really enjoyed my readings, that I wrote really well, and that it was all incredibly atmospheric. And I thought I was going to faint. So thanks, Richard - you really don’t know how much that means.  

And then Mark signed my jar with the immortal missive ‘Bollocks! Let me out you nobby!’ (as you can probably see in the picture) and my life was complete.

Thanks to everyone I met and who made me feel exceptionally welcome on Saturday - nothing is forgotten. Nothing is ever forgotten. 

Although I nearly left my memory stick in the official convention PC.

A few people have asked recently what made me zoom relentlessly around the conventions mentioned in Wiffle Lever. Especially considering that, at the time, there wasn’t any sniff of this resulting in a book… and that the whole strange escapade took a relentless toll on my credit card bills (from which they’re still recovering, in fact my Natwest Maestro card remains in a critical condition in intensive care, having a handful of 10p pieces fed to it intravenously at the end of every month).

The answer, I’ve realised tonight, is that I have a staggeringly addictive nature. I’ve always suspected this to be the case, but it was really driven home this evening when, at 11pm, I went to the all-night Tesco to buy two packets of chocolate digestives to see me through a few days of intensive writing ahead. I always eat lots of biscuits when I’m writing, usually averaging a packet of custard creams for every 1000 words, and then treating myself to a Penguin at the end of every chapter. Although sooner or later I’m going to have to face up to the fact that he belongs with his family in Antarctica. 

Every one a winner.

Anyway, I arrived home at 11.30 and decided - unwisely - to eat “just one” digestive from the top of the packet. You guessed it… I’ve just finished the lot.

Which is pretty much a biscuity metaphor for the conventions in Wiffle. The Doctor Who convention I went to in November 2005 was the “just one” at the top of the packet, but then Star Wars a month later became the “no-one will notice if I have another”, and Blake’s 7 in the New Year was the “what’s wrong with eating three biscuits anyway?”. By the time I got to Robin Of Sherwood I was on a mad sugar rush, babbling to Nickolas Grace with crumbs all over my lapels, and when I got home from Red Dwarf at the end of 2006 I was a bloated mess in the corner of the house - belching, feeling unbelievably guilty, and wiping milk chocolate from around my mouth with the back of my hand.  Before starting on the Penguin again… or “Mr Flibble” as I insisted on calling him.

So now I feel a bit ill. And that’s not a metaphor, I genuinely do - I’ve just eaten 24 chocolate digestives in two hours and I need to go to bed. I’m the Amy Winehouse of the biscuit world, and should probably thank my lucky stars that I’ve never dabbled in anything stronger - crack cocaine for example, or Jaffa Cakes.  

Digestive Rehab here we come.

No, no, no.

(None of this has anything to do with Frankenbiscuits, by the way)

Frankenbiscuits. Don’t ask, all will probably become apparent sooner or later.

Feel free to speculate, though.

…and I’m blowing back to the Robin Of Sherwood convention next weekend!

Big thanks to organisers Les and Sue who have kindly allowed me to wander down to Nottingham next Saturday to meet all the friends I made at Legend 2006, and to shamble onstage to do a few readings from the Robin Of Sherwood chapter of Wiffle. I’m now frantically wondering whether I’ve got the guts to go there and reveal that Mark “Nasir” Ryan’s transatlantic phone message last time around made me cry… knowing full well that he’s there in person this year!

I blame it on the white wine.

I’m also torn as to whether to take The Curse-d Dolls with me. As regular blog-readers (both of you) will know, these little woollen terrors have blighted my life with their double-stitched evil ever since I drunkenly bought them at 2006’s charity auction. I might just take Nasir, providing I can find a lead-lined casket to keep him in.

But the biggest dilemma of all is… do I do it in my Friar Tuck outfit?   

Blimey, it’s hot! I was in Darlington this afternoon, and it was like striding around the sun-baked deserts of Tatooine. Which is odd, as last week it was more like the ice planet of Hoth. Although I notice tomorrow is forecast to be eerily reminscent of the rain-swept water world P’Ssingdown. The secret rebel base that Princess Leia never mentions very much.

And why was I in Darlington? The world singularly fails to ask. But I’ll tell you anyway… I’ve been asked by the nice people at Darlington Library to be their official author (as opposed to all the maverick, unofficial authors out there - bloody cowboys) for the National Year Of Reading. Yay! So thanks to Jeannie and James for making me coffee and being very pleasant to me - looks like I’ll be doing a few readings and workshops and things over there in the next few months.

The meeting also contained the bizarre following conversation:

James: Did you cover the Discworld Convention in 2006?
Me: Yes. Why, are you a fan?
James: Oh yes. I was head of the Priest’s Guild. I conducted the Church Of Om service on the Sunday morning.

It’s a small world, and - in this case - it’s also flat and on the back of a bloody big turtle.

I also popped into Darlington Arts Centre while I was there and got a couple of tickets to see Dean Haglund. Yep, Langley of the Lone Gunmen, the lank-haired conspiracy theorist in all nine series of The X Files. He’s doing his improv comedy X Files show on Saturday night, and I can’t wait to meet him and get my DVDs signed.

Altogether now,  you can take the boy out of the convention…    

Hello all… sorry for the little break in transmission, real life intervened for a brief spell. Boooooo!

I’ve had a first review! Sort of. Yesterday morning, a copy of the trade magazine The Bookseller arrived, and they’ve picked out Wiffle Lever To Full! as their “Top Title” in the humour section of their new titles, describing it as a “highly entertaining field report-cum-misty-eyed childhood memoir about the weird parallel universe that is the SF, cult TV and film conventions”.

Which is nice. I’m facing up to these things with a mixture of anticipation and utter terror, though. I’ve never done anything in my life before worthy of being officially “reviewed”, and I’m not sure whether to duck and cover when these things start appearing. I like to think I’m a bluff old cove who can laugh off criticism, but I’m a sensitive soul at heart. I get paranoid if someone laughs at my trousers (which has happened so often that I should really be used to it by now).

I’ve also noticed a couple of people seemingly concerned that the book might be a merciless mickey-take of sci-fi fans and the way they act at conventions. Which I’m kind of keen to address, really.  Yes, the book’s meant to be funny, and as such it does have some stories of delightfully eccentric behaviour and oddness at these conventions. And such behaviour often comes from myself.

But what I was really keen to avoid (and I hope I have) is a kind of “pointing at the geeks” exercise. I haven’t written this book as an outsider’s perspective on fandom, I wrote it from the point of view of someone who was going to these conventions anyway, as a fan.  I genuinely love all of the TV shows and films that I covered, and didn’t go into them all with the outright intention of writing a book. That idea gestated as I went to more and more events, and I only started writing and looking for a publisher once the whole trip was done and dusted. So while there’s a lot of humour and eccentricity in there, I hope it’s seen to have all the affection that I intended, rather than anything more cynical.

I like to think that most fans have a sense of humour about the things that they do, and in fact I’ve even been contacted by one Robin Of Sherwood fan who was keen that I made them look like ”a PROPER bunch of weirdos” rather than trying to dress things up nicely! Although, ironically, most of the fans I met at the Robin Of Sherwood convention were dressed up nicely, usually in medieval wench’s costumes or nuns’ habits.

And that was just the men. I thangggyou.  

Had a bit of a Wiffle-intensive day today. My Hodder correspondant Heather called this morning to chat about the final adjustments to the book before it goes off to the printers, and we were on the phone for two hours discussing whether the comma on line 4 of page 136 should actually be a hyphen, and whether ”The Doctor” should be “the Doctor” without the capital “T”, and if that still applies when you chuck a number into the equation like ”the Sixth Doctor”. It’s actually the longest continuous conversation I’ve ever had without the aid of artificial stimulants, and embarrassingly I had to break off halfway through to go for a wee. I put the phone down first, though.

And then Henry from publicity called to discuss Important Things like “How do we make people who don’t want to buy your book buy it”, and we decided the best policy was for me just to never refuse any single opportunity for free press. So apologies in advance if you soon get utterly sick of the sight of my fat face clogging up otherwise perfectly fine newspaper pages, or my grumbly Northern voice chuntering on over various airwaves.  Still, as Lionel Blair once said to me as I lit his cigarette on the balcony of Durham Gala Theatre, “Never turn anything down Bob, and you’ll stay in work for the rest of your life”.

True that, I also bought him a large scotch and talked a little about the day he spent in 1964 working on A Hard Day’s Night. The film that is, not the album. He doesn’t play the castanets on Can’t Buy Me Love or anything like that. He was lovely, though.  

And then I ate bangers and mash with my girlfriend while we watched The One Show. She offered me some brown sauce. I didn’t turn it down. Lionel would have been proud of me.

Well, I’m back! I had an amazing weekend, met some absolute fruitcakes, and split my wellies on the banks of a lake, but I’m not saying any more than that. Although it’s worth storing the phrase “The Hedgehog Machine” in the back of your mind and seeing if it crops up anywhere in any future scribblings of mine…

Ah, the enigma…

Anyway, back to normal duties today - I’ve had some very nice messages over the weekend from Robin Of Sherwood fans who seem to have discovered ‘Wiffle’, and one from a nice woman in Canada who reckoned I was her new hero! Which isn’t recommended, I’ll only let you down. There’s nothing very heroic about me, especially in the mornings.

And in other news, ‘Wiffle Lever To Full!’ has popped up for pre-order on Play.com, although we’re currently trying to persuade them that I’m not called ‘Bobby Fischer’ and bear no relation to deceased Chess Grand Masters.

So come on then, let’s have your guesses as to what ‘The Hedgehog Machine’ actually is…