I left school at the end of 1966 and didn't start university until the following Autumn. I enrolled at L'institut britannique in Paris in January 1967 but soon got bored and joined a friend with a car on a trip to Morocco. We stopped off in Aix-en-Provence to pick up a couple of other guys, one of whom was called Nick Drake. We had many adventures and spent time together later at Cambridge and in London. He died in 1974 having made a couple of records. Since then he has become a cult figure. It's bizarre to think that forty years after I met him he would be posthumously releasing a new album; that there would be a new biography of him; and that his sister, Gabrielle, would be publishing a letter and podcast to him for the world to read and hear. Sister and brother below.

There is an excellent article in the latest issue of Logos about the insularity of the world's book trade press. I'll ask the author's and publisher's permission to run it here in due course. Meanwhile, here is a genuinely non-Angloamerican trade press website, Publishing Today, from China. I particularly like their bestseller list which contains only one 'Western' title but which also has some of the best names for publishing companies I can imagine. I think the British Machine Press has a nice ring to it.

And finally, I wrote about my discovery of the Unabridged Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and here, courtesy of Terry Lee who just happened to be passing with a camera in hand, is the evidence. Messrs Onions, Fowler, Burchfield etc would be turning in their graves.