iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Mind you, this is what I’m reading now. My third upmarket reprint in a row (Daunt Books, after a Vintage and a Persephone). I’ll be reading it incredibly slowly.

BARBARA COMYNS
'A neglected genius.’
Observer
ATOUCH OF MISTLETOE
With an introduction by MEGAN NOLAN

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Today, Mum would’ve been 82. She adored my sister’s two sons and it makes me sad that she didn’t live to know her two granddaughters.

Mum with two rescued horses. Mid-90s, I think.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Does anyone enjoy being a celebrity and a friend to the powerful and bloody awful as this profoundly unturbulent priest?

Reverend Richard Coles
1h •
Some people are so awful they break the awful barrier and you realise you have started liking them*. I had this with Jeffrey Archer.
He was once a celebrity reader at a carol service I was doing and agreed to read the prologue to the Fourth Gospel. I handed him the text, he scanned it, and said gravely, 'oh dear, Father, I would SO much prefer to read the King James Version. Could you?'
Of course' I said and came back two minutes later and handed him the same piece of paper, for it actually was from the King James Bible. He looked at it again and grunted approvingly. 'Thank you, Father. Much better.

*T&Cs apply

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Nice Easter egg in The Marble Hall Murders.

Portrait of Michael Elphick in reception.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

This came up on FB memories today. I snapped it in the classroom of a teacher I was covering two years ago. For not entirely unrelated reasons, I requested I not be sent back to that school.

I AM READING...
"Hillbilly
Elegy
by
J.D. Vance

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

At book launch for Andrew Davies’s memoirs in his local bookshop — Kenilworth Books. Couldn’t stay, which is a shame because he’s always so generous. Remember chatting with him for ages after a talk he gave at Warwick Uni on adaptations, around the time he was working on Bleak House.

An
Unsuitable
Boy
A Life in Scripts
Andrew
Davies

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Up early on my birthday with restless babies. Catching up with event telly of 1974. I’m always glad to see Ian Hogg pop up in stuff. He had a good early 70s, what with this and Polanski’s Macbeth and Peter Brook’s King Lear. I saw him on stage in the 90s at the RSC, where he was a little subdued.

Ian Hogg as a political firebrand in Penda’s Fen.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

This bookshop, cryogenically preserved in the run up to Christmas 2019.

Promotional display for Philip Pullman’s second instalment of The Book of Dust.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

On to Fritz Lang’s 1951 revenge Western/Marlene Dietrich vehicle Rancho Notorious. All the songs should be replaced by “Rocky Racoon” (though I wish they hadn’t cut off Marlene’s rendition of “Gypsy Davey”).

Poster for Rancho Notorious:

WHERE ANYTHING GOES
...FOR A PRICE!
MARLENE DIETRICH
ARTHUR KENNEDY
MEL FERRER
in
RANCHO NOTORIOUS
COLOR BY
TECHNICOLOR
DIRECTED BY FRITZ LANG

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Am I alone in finding this image utterly nightmarish?

It’s from the picture book GOODNIGHT MOON by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd. First published in 1947. Honestly, the whole thing is haunted.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

In Edinburgh in 2019. The JK Rowling cafe was disappointing.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

S3E12 — and the Brigadier joins the cast.

Nicholas Courtney and Christopher Timothy propping up the bar at The Drover’s.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

This is how easy it’s been to research my Hitler and the Daily Mail novel. Edits going well. I hope the publisher agrees!

Two adjacent headlines in 20 December 1933 edition of the Mail: HITLER'S REPLY TO FRANCE and LOCH MONSTER'S TRACKS FOUND?

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Struggling to read again, so going for something extremely well loved. Banks was effortless, wasn’t he? I recall one reviewer writing that if he only stopped being so prolific, he’d write a real masterpiece. I know what they were getting at; but this is as close to a masterpiece as makes no odds.

Very dog-eared paperback of The Crow Road in that 90s b&w livery.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

There you go. And Peter Davison says that when he was offered the role on Doctor Who he assumed they’d confused him with Robert Hardy.

Robert Hardy, Patrick Troughton and Peter Davison, with four-legged patient.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Look who’s turned up in All Creatures Great and Small. No initial encounter between the Second and Fifth Doctors since Tristan stays in the car while Siegfried talks to the traveller played by Patrick Troughton. Tristan does say something about envying his lifestyle though…

Patrick Troughton in full eighteen and beard and flat cap with the Dales behind him. This is S3E4 of All Creatures Great and Small.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

I love doing the morning shift. This has always been my favourite time of day, but it’s better than ever just now.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Exchanging baby photos with Dad. I’m guessing this was taken in a studio in Denison TX circa 1941. Dad’s in the sailor suit here, with his little brother and his ma. I never knew my grandma, whose own mother was of the Choctaw Nation.

B&w photo from the 40s of a mother and her two children.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

…everything this novel is praised for would cause the industry’s hackles to rise now. There’s a quote from the Washington Post on the back that tells us it’s for “those who feel Barbara Pym-ish on some days and Stephen King-ish on others”. But such tonal shifts are absolutely verboten now. 2/

Part macabre comedy, part crime thriller, part cosy romance, John Bowen's The Girls is a novel like none other. Told with warmth and affection, yet laced with dark unease, 'the girls' will ensure you never look on Middle England quite so quaintly again.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Making my way more haltingly through John Bowen’d “rediscovered” novel The Girls than I think I would if I wasn’t trying to read it during feeding and changing duties. It’s so precisely my sort of thing — not just what I want to read, but what I’d like to write. But… 1/

That copy of John Bowen’s The Girls that’s everywhere at the moment.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Once again, I am waiting for my appointment with Dr WC Fields.

Antique dentist’s chair in cast iron and green velvet upholstery.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Started listening to @drjamesbailey.bsky.social’s Muriel Spark autobiography Like a Cat Loves a Bird while on feeding and changing duty for the twins. I love how someone as precise with words as Spark was reduced to a microblogging style exclamatives in the face of Victoria Falls.

Like a Cat Loves a Bird
James Bailey

Cover image is Muriel Spark holding a cat

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Christopher Lee always insisted he wore a bald wig in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. If so, it’s the most realistic piece of pate furniture he ever sported…

High-foreheaded Mycroft in Wilder & Diamond’s masterwork.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Epigraph to Silas Marner, which I’m reading while waiting with my wife in the maternity ward of George Eliot Hospital.

"A child, more than all other gifts
That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with It, and forward-looking thoughts."
WORDSWORTH

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Don’t want a big car, but this is tricky. There’s room in the boot for carry cots or the buggy frame (into which both carry cots and car seats fit, but you’re not supposed to wheel babies around in car seats). Every day’s going to be that problem of three passengers and a boat that only holds two.

Two infant car seats in the back of a Citroen C3.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

So grateful to the people who planted these limes and maples.

Our Victorian terraced street with its lines of pollarded trees.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

It’s noticeably quieter down by the pond, but this is a nice haul. The linnet is the only one I’d query.

Merlin app:
I Eurasian Linnet

Common Reed Warbler

Eurasian Moorhen

Eurasian Blackbird

European Goldfinch

Eurasian Blackcap

Great Crested Grebe o

House Sparrow
08:09

Eurasian Wren

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

I reckon this is pretty atmospheric too.

070

Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Honestly, the ravens kronking to each other from pylon to pylon are gothic as fuck.

Common Raven among songbirds and doves on Merlin

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

The grebelings are very big now but still peeping to be fed by their adults.

030

Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Don’t think this photo of a Great Crested Grebe and its almost-grown brood will pass muster on Springwatch. Interesting how this Midlands pair are so far ahead of their pair in Northern Ireland.

iPhone snap of GCB and three youngsters.

030

Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

My fixed focus camera for use taking photos of initially fixed focussed, tiny people. Probably ought to have gone for a half frame option. Anyway, this’ll do the job. If I like the results, might invest in a reconditioned higher spec film camera later on.

Very cheap point-and-shoot 35mm camera and a 35mm colour film canister.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

I bought a copy of this Cahiers du Cinéma but it hasn’t made it out of whatever box we put it in when we moved. This came up on FB memories today. I guess it’s an actual tweet. Remember them?

Jonathan Coe C @jonathancoe • 2h
Very happy to be featured in this month's @cahierscinema, complete with a really nice photo of Wilder and Diamond (one that l'd never seen before) and an overdue shout-out to @patrickkincaid.
(cc @PaulDiamond3).

Il y a une raison très simple et une plus compliquée. La première est qu'il y a déjà un roman autour de La Vie privée de Sherlock Holmes, écrit par un de mes amis, Patrick Kincaid: The Continuity Girl (2014)! Mais je ne l'aurais peut-être pas fait, de toute façon. Car j'avais déjà écrit ce texte pour les Cahiers sur Sherlock Holmes, et au fond je sentais que j'y avais déjà dit tout…

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

We had a baby shower yesterday. We didn’t do a gender reveal (because why?), but apparently we’re under pressure to do a “ginger reveal” (a lot riding on my maternal grandfather’s genes making it into the mix).

Double trouble banner. We were warned we’d get a lot of that.

Heather in red maternity dress against starry back cloth.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

None of the newer streets around us have this. These beautiful lime trees are making all the difference today.

The street where I live: Victorian terraces lined with pollarded lime trees (and the odd maple or plane).

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Five years ago my father-in-law released the Peregrine he’d nursed back to health after finding it dazed under a pylon.

Grab from the Facebook reel showing the falcon erupting into the air from an Amazon Prime box. Jeff Bezos had nothing to do with this wonderful moment.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Common Chiffchaff, or as I like to call them, Riffraff Chiffchaff.

Merlin app suggestions:
Willow Warbler

House Sparrow

Eurasian Coot

Eurasian Blackbird

Great Crested Grebe O

Eurasian Magpie

Common Chiffchaff

050

Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Professor Sir Stanley Wells (that formula never looks right, does it?)* is 96 today. I remember noting he was the same age as Clint Eastwood when I was at the Shakespeare Institute in the 90s. So many similarities… *Except for Prof Sir Christopher Frayling. That’s how he was christened, isn’t it?

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Hosting an author Q&A tonight at my writing workshop with Jess Shannon. Jess was my fellow student on the MA at Warwick and was very obviously a star in the making.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Lincoln is the hardest possible place to escape from by car between 5 and 7pm. So I went for a curry instead. This Nepalese restaurant is fantastic. At waiter’s suggestion, I went for the Lasun Kukura Khursani. “Don’t worry — if you don’t like it, I’ll eat it.” Reader, I liked it.

HIMALAYAN CURRY NEPALESE & INDIAN CUISINE 01522 541 930

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Another extraordinary day, this time at HMP Lincoln.

Stratford Literary Festival Outreach
Workshops in Prisons
We deliver day-long workshops to prisoners, both male and female, all over the country, helping them to write a bedtime story for their children or grandchildren.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

My mother-in-law dropped these by yesterday. I think we’ve already chosen though. It’s a ridiculous responsibility. And to think, I spend almost no time on choosing names for my characters. They just pop into my head.

Two books: 4001 Babie’s Names and Their Meanings; and The Celtic Baby Names Books

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Not-so-Mute Swan. What a weird noise.

Merlin app report including Mute Swann, Chiffchaff and Blackbird

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Thought getting to the Mark Gatiss event at Stratford Literary Festival 15 minutes early would be fine.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Anna Caig’s The Wise Witch of Orkney. Have been waiting for this to reach the top of my to-read pile for far too long. 2026 hasn’t been a year for fast reading.

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Patrick Kincaid @patrickkincaid.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

We went to Oxford for the day & visited the Bodleian Library Wonder of Birds exhibition. It’s free, so if you’re in Oxford, go. Worth it for everything — the Jackie Morris illustrations, the C12th Persian mss etc. But it was the first draft of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Windhover” that did it for me.

Didn’t take photos till we were out of the exhibition. Here’s H sprouting Jackie Morris wings.

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