Engine Punk

The cover depicted here may not be what you get. Do let me know what comes in the post if you order one. The Horsepower Whisperer and The Wormton Lamb are still available on Amazon but I am re-launching both books with new covers. This is because I have finished writing the rest of the Soul Trader trilogy and will be gradually releasing two new books that continue the misadventures of Hob the Horsepower Whisperer and his chumrades. If anyone orders hard copies of either The Horsepower Whisperer or The Wormton Lamb, they will receive a book with the old cover until any stock is used up. Any print-on-demand orders for The Wormton Lamb with Amazon should already feature the latest cover design. This has not happened in the past. I know that a relative bought a copy of The Horsepower Whisperer from Amazon last year and it had the very first ever cover, dating back to 2008. I am now up to cover number three. I can only assume Amazon ordered a stock of my books on publication and they may st...

I am very interested in Infra Red photography and the haunting images it provides once converted to black and white  Engine Punk began as a means of promoting my writing but this blog has grown a life of its own. The Vintage Things and Fire Drakes that I've happened across are noteworthy and I want to share my enthusiasm about them at a very personal level.  Steamers at Boconnoc. I believe we will one day come to think of the internal combustion engine as fondly as we do those that are external. They are even making new steam engines sixty years after destroying so many! There simply aren't enough to go round. Engine Punk is also a record of my low budget motorsport activities. There have been so many of them, they become a blur, a blur not through speed but from confused memories over a surprising length of time. I discovered across the Pontsarn viaduct one frosty moonlit night, appearing across the valley as I crested the hill. Actually, it was late summer but you get the pi...

Vote for me! Thanks everyone for your messages of congratulation on my re-election as MP for Harrow East. I will admit to being a little surprised but am encouraged to think that I’ve been doing something right recently – although, on reflection perhaps I should say, instead of "right", the ethically proper thing to do. However, I am saddened to see my views so mis-represented in the press, the TV and other anti-social media. My views on gay marriage have been completely mis-represented . Let’s be quite clear – I am in favour of it. As a heterosexual man, I see marriage in the cultural and historically British sense as being a field of open and underhand conflict in which one spouse stops the other from doing the things they like. See how marriage is depicted in the media, the language on the street and moaned about in the workplace. Let’s face it – marriage needs reforming. Two people, who genuinely harbour affection for each other, should enable and support t...

Steampunk Summer 2012 I will be reading excerpts from The Horsepower Whisperer at Steampunk Summer 2012 at Woodland Valley Farm, Ladock near Truro this Saturday (September 1st) and talking about my work. I might even read some of The Wormton Lamb, too. Tickets are available from Limelight in Truro and Tanya's Courage Trust in Penzance. It's not just me, you understand, there's also a huge line up of steam punk activities and something like a dozen bands. Should be brilliant if previous ones are anything to go by....

There's something interesting going on across the internet at the moment. Somebody else has picked up the engine punk ball and is running with it. Engine Punk Litmus is a blog that suggests examples of the engine punk aesthetic and I have to say that so far - having coined the phrase in a tongue-in-cheek effort to pigeonhole my own brand of sci fi fantasy writing - the suggestions so far are pretty much what I would call engine punk. But what do other people think?

I was near Andover at the weekend with my neighbour and tractor man Andrew. We dropped in on my scrap buddy, Rob Robinson-Collins who has a weakness for Allards. Here are Rob and Andrew in Rob and Tina's back garden. If ever Rob rings me up to tell me that he has discovered another Allard, or parts thereof, I don't dissuade him. I encourage him. I'm happy to say that he is rarely in any doubt about the desirability of any Allard or Allard parts so it is not difficult for him to follow my advice to, "Buy it!" We both realise that this is not really what having a scrap buddy is all about. What should happen, is that one of us says to the other, "Look, what you really want is just one car and one motorbike and that's it." Sometimes, one of us might actually say this but it is quickly ignored. Very often, this sentence is not uttered at all. Here, Rob is explaining the niceties of shortening an Allard chassis to Andrew's boots. You may have not...

Many years ago when I was a student and rock regularly went to college, there was an outbreak of new wave synthesiser bands. Some of these pre-programmed their tunes into keyboards and drum machines and the proceeded to stand by their electronic equipment. That was their idea of playing live and would have been disposable pop if had been popular but this phase didn't last. It was just boring and didn't appeal. For a while in my very late teens I thought the synthesiser sound was great but this soon descended into the sort of pretentious rubbish indulged in by the talentless that said "actually, we're more of a studio band." Nowadays, like Stiff Little Fingers, I believe in the power of guitar and drum but Montarg and Krayon - aka Starbase 109 - have got something. I dunno what but it's definitely a something. But Starbase 109 had my feet tapping when they supported The Stranglers at Exeter University on Friday nite. And quite a few people were danci...

Everyone should have a scrap buddy. Rob Robinson-Collins is mine. You'll have heard about him before on this blog and I do what I can to be his scrap buddy. This is how it works. If either of us becomes tempted by a desirable piece of scrap, they ring the other up and enthuse all about it. The scrap buddy's job is to offer wise counsel to the scrap addict and generally talk them out of temptation and get them back on the tidy uncluttered road to impossible self-righteousnes. "Right," says the scrap buddy to the scrap addict. "All you want is one car and one bike and that's it." Of course, it never works like that. We always start out with the best intention but before long the scrap addicts enthusiasm gets the better of both of us and the scrap buddy will interrupt the ravings of the scrap addict with a small but significant question. "How much did you say they want for it?" Or "And has it got any shiny bits with it?" ...

They're still burning. Stiff Little Fingers celebrate 31 years of punk rock this year and they're just as good as ever. I know because I saw them last night at the Bristol Academy. It's a bit of a trek up from Cornwall and I find it advisable to take a day off work afterwards because I don't get home until 0200 hours but Stiff Little Fingers still play with such conviction they keep me turning up at their gigs. Their live performances are consistently superlative. I know most of the words as well and if you don't go to church or have no interest in football like me, the opportunities for community singing are somewhat limited so I need bands like SLF. "Fingers!" I went up with my mate Gary and when we arrived at the venue, two little girls had been sidelined by the door staff since they'd drunk the best part of a bottle of whisky between them. Gary and I had arranged to meet up with Gary's mate Dave from Gloucester so, as we were waiting,...

So what is an engine punk again? An engine is any sort of mechanical contrivance. The original calculator was described as a difference engine. My interest is mainly internal combustion engines and the uses to which they can be put. Or put-put-put-put. According to Wikipedia a punk is "a young male hustler, a gangster, a hoodlum, or a ruffian" and for many years it had that kind of negativity. But with punk rock came the kick-ass, DIY sub-culture thing and that is pretty much mainstream these days with the internet and all the connectivity that it offers. I'm not a gangster or very young any more but I certainly feel like a punk and if my Stiff Little Fingers will let me I can bash out "I wanna be a Ramone" by The Scopies.

Somebody said they found the 5 star review on Amazon useful. This morning my ranking leapt up to 36,762! It's now back down to 73,576 but I am 76th in Contemporary Sci-Fi! That's in the top 100! I didn't realise I was "urban fantasy", too. I now declare a moratorium on bragging about my Amazon rankings. I expect it's getting a bit boring for you (although the novelty obviously hasn't worn off for me). I had intended to do this when I received the much coveted three digit Amazon ranking but reckon 76th beats everything. Thinks - if 73,756th overal relates to 76th, where would I have been at 36,762th? In the top 50? Okay, that's all on this subject I promise. It's not my fault if I'm popular.

Horsepower whispering with a Ginetta G21S Six foot of two by two timber isn’t in everyone’s toolkit. The day I helped my mate Pete Low re–assemble the engine in his Ginetta, neither of us had such a thing. Pete’s day job is vicar of St Budeaux in Plymouth . This means the days off he gets are Mondays. Fortunately, last week I had a clear Monday so our packed diaries coincided for once and we were able to start work in earnest on his car. When I arrived at the vicarage, it was immediately apparent that he’d bought all the gaskets and assembled a fine array of hand and power tools. He’d even arranged for good weather. Pete’s Ginetta is a G21S. He’d bought it with a reconditioned engine that needed re–assembling. The ordinary G21 has a 1725cc engine made by the now–defunct Rootes group for the Hillman Hunter range. The G21S has a special head developed by Holbay, which was used in the sportier Hunters and Rapiers. All we had to do was fit the cylinder head, carburettors and exhau...

Any resemblance to St Piran's Cross is purely intentional. The noteworthy thing about this cross, which stands in dunes above Perranporth, is that the arms of the Celtic wheeled cross have rotated. The arms have become spokes and the cross is more than a wheel than ever. Anarchadia Publishing is an independent small publisher that’s publishing the first part of the Soul Trader trilogy, entitled The Horsepower Whisperer. Between each part of the Soul Trader trilogy, stand alone stories featuring some of the characters from The Horsepower Whisperer will also be published. The first of these, The Wormton Lamb, is currently in the editorial process and will follow soon after the launch of The Horsepower Whisperer. All these stories are set in and around Anarchadia, an anarchic arcadia and temperate archipelago somewhere off the north west cost of Yerp.    There's an element of self parody to some of my work but the books are real enough Books from Anarchadia wil...