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Just before I moved house, I posted my guillotine for sale on Gumtree — for a paltry price, too, just hoping to get some pocket money for the move. A man came and bought it, aiming to use it in producing a sports-related newsletter. I think it’ll work well for his job, but for books it was a half-angel, half-demon device.

Yes, it quickly sliced through a thick novel like the proverbial hot butter-knife. But no matter how carefully I lined up the book or how tightly I cranked down the bar that held the book in place, the blade would inevitably chop through the paper at an angle — usually not-quite-right, sometimes very wrong.

Picture a novel opened to a page, its right-justified text acting as a black, lettery ruler pointing out that the blank right margin gets closer and closer to the text as it goes down the page. I was never happy with that, and several times, in trying to fix it with additional cuts on the guillotine, I would ruin the almost-finished book. It was a very frustrating waste. I know people like the little imperfections that remind them a book is hand-bound, but this funny-angle business was a flaw I was comfortable with.

I sold the guillotine knowing another solution was on its way to me. Of course, I’d just given away my existing solution, so this new one had to work — my ability to make books and run my own press depended on it. So off went the heavy metal guillotine, and, just at the last minute arrived a book-binding lying press, wooden tub, and plough. I didn’t even have a chance to take them out of their boxes before the movers had to take them away.

Now that we’re all moved in, with everything unpacked and in its place, with the boxes all stored up in the attic, I finally had a chance to test out my equipment — which, even though it’s new, looks antique in its design. The parts are all big, heavy blocks of birchwood, and its threading screws are all hand-tooled.

I sewed together a couple of book blocks while watching TV with the fella the other night, then yesterday got to work with the plough. I was nervous, because my whole process depended on this working. And it did.

The plough proved to be worlds better than working with the guillotine, because I can set the book exactly where I want it in the press, then trim the edge with absolute precision. The result is so smooth — it feels wonderful on the fingertips. It takes much longer to go back and forth, back and forth with the plough, but it’s worth it to produce a predictable result and not ruin a whole book. And there’s something rewarding about doing something the way it was done for hundreds of years.

A friend gave me an old wallpaper sample book, so I decided to indulge myself and use some of its wonderful screenprinted pages for cover paper and end-papers. Here’s the result, which I present, for once, without any apology or excuses:

I can’t wait to try it on a novel. I may even decide to reduce the outside margins on my books, which will mean they’re thinner and use less paper. I had to leave a wide margin before to reduce the visible discrepancy between the angle of the type and the angle of the book’s edge.

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I’m sitting here in my new office, finished work for the day, and trying to figure out why I’ve been stuck for a while. Not stuck, really; I don’t subscribe to that whole writer’s block drama, which is about not being able to finish work you’ve started. I haven’t started anything for a while, and I’m wondering why.

It’s not like I haven’t been busy. I’ve been doing lots of other stuff — bookbinding, moving home and all that, and producing my podcast, but a new novel just hasn’t been forthcoming.

I also don’t subscribe to the idea that artists have to be miserable to be productive. But I’ve been having a really happy time for the past year and a half, and along with the joy of this relationship has come a lot of new activity. Perhaps the truth of it is that artists who are miserable have to be productive because they’re alone; nobody wants to hang around that.

I guess I just haven’t had anything to say, really. And now I’ve moved up here, and something unspoken that I’ve just admitted to myself is that I don’t feel I have anything to say that people here would relate to. It’s the gay thing — not that my work is all about that, but because that’s there, I think it could be alienating.

Then again, my experience so far is that such thoughts underestimate reality. Craig and I went to a neighbourhood meeting the other night, the new people on the block, and once again no one blinked an eye at our being a couple.

It feels, though, like I’m not writing anything because I’m censoring ideas before they gets anywhere close to the surface. What’s that about? Too much online reading of others’ opinions about books and publishing and what constitutes the “right” kind of book. Add to that a decade of writing books, putting them out, and learning that it doesn’t happen like magic, like the stories you hear before you’ve tried it yourself and discovered the realities.

I’m regrouping.

That said, I love my new creative space, and I am actually researching an idea for a novel — the least fanciful, most grounded one so far. I’m just waiting to see if there are enough ideas in it to light me up and carry me for a year and some.

The trick, I know, is for me to communicate with the story and tell the one that speaks to my heart the most, giving not one thought to what the world outside thinks. That might mean turning off Twitter, unfollowing some RSS feeds, and digging deep in myself instead. Ironically, I also know that not thinking about the result is the way to create the best result, whereas trying to be pleasing, measuring the market, and all that usual stuff one tries to do to avoid rejection is the surest way to produce a boring turd of a project.

…if I didn’t admit that it’s daunting to look around this place and realise I’m not just visiting here.

That said, the view when we were out buying groceries last night, out over wide open green fields, felt like a good thing. I remembered my grandmother declaring of Prince Edward Island, “You have more sky here!” It’s like that.

Walking into town this afternoon, I was extra-conscious of being polite on the pavement, stepping down onto the street for women with prams or the street-sweeper with his cart. Yesterday as the landlord was fixing things around our house, I brought up a news item I’d read about in the local paper’s RSS feed, and it turned out he was one of the people involved. Yup, everyone knows everyone, so I will have to make sure my Canadian politeness will be turned up to its highest setting.

I passed several pairs of people who’d stopped to chat on the street, and now I’m in the old post office, which has been converted into a chain pub (that offers free WiFi), and several customers have stopped at someone’s table to say hello as they came in.

But I don’t know anyone. Not yet. And I’m not sure how that will start to change.

No regrets, though. I like an adventure.

Yesterday, as I learned how to prepare then hang pencil-pleat curtains, I felt uncomfortably like Julianne Moore’s character in The Hours. As I interspersed work-work with setting up house, culminating in a bit of flat-pack assembly in the afternoon that made me feel like Jacob wrestling with a wooden angel, I kept thinking about that character, and felt sure that being a housewife would soon drive me totally stark raving mad. It’s not a judgment, just a personality thing.

I haven’t fully arrived here yet. The fella and I have been so busy setting up our home that I’ve been busy staying within the confines of our house. And, since it’s the first house I’ve lived in for ages, it doesn’t feel particularly confining. And there’s a lot to do, with more packages and appliances and services arriving daily.

Still, I will soon have to step outside. The thought of that makes me realise something else: besides Craig, I don’t know anyone here. I imagine that would freak a lot of people out, but I’m okay with it for a few reasons:

1. It gives me big space to do my own stuff for the next little while.
2. I’m sure we’ll know people soon enough. I have lots of past experiences of this — including a trans-Atlantic move — to back up this hunch.
3. I’m still in regular contact with good friends and my family, thanks to the ‘net. That said, apologies if I’ve dropped the communication ball in the past few days; living in a house full of boxes and piles of things, with lots still missing (like a fridge!) is very disruptive. Order is coming to our house, though, slowly and surely.

High road, low road — whichever, we’ll shortly be on our way to the Highlands.

I’m sitting in Craig’s now-empty flat, as the movers have left with all our belongings in a giant lorry which will, somehow, traverse all the little windy roads up to Wick by the end of the day.

As has been my experience of everyone from there so far, the movers were really friendly and chatty, and didn’t even blink at the prospect of Craig and me being a couple. There may be a Conservative dork in the news who’s using a divisive “gays aren’t normal” platform to try to garner election support, but I feel from what I’ve witnessed so far that people’s misgivings about us as a same-sex couple moving up north are groundless in reality. As I tweeted yesterday, politics and the news sketch the world in terms of duality and conflict, but real life is better than that. People have a greater capacity for understanding than we often give them credit for. I suppose the truth will probably be somewhere in the middle, but hopefully leaning toward the types of good people we’ve met so far.

My brother pointed out that a move is a great time to do an audit of the stuff we’ve collected, and this move has been no different. Yet this time I haven’t encountered all kinds of “Oh, why did I buy that?” items; instead, I had a few things I gave to people — for money or not — who could make use of them, and the rest was mostly material I could take down the street to the giant recycling wheelie-bins. Most of these things had already been through a first life, too — I was just holding onto them because I thought I might someday turn them into something else. I still packed a boatload of various sheets and rolls and scraps of paper, but for the rest I asked myself, “Really? Are you really going to use that?”, and binned whatever got a no.

It’s been a huge job, getting ready to go, culminating in cleaning up the empty old flat with my once-flatmate, back-to-being-my-buddy Patrick and his partner Joe, who’s a really kind and light-hearted spirit wrapped in the body of an Australian surf-god (with a Scots accent).

Unlike the last flat, which became a battle at the end with the letting agency over what constitutes “clean” when you’ve inherited decades of other peoples’ gunk, this flat polished up satisfyingly, so hopefully we’ll get all of our deposit back. We finished up with Chinese food at Patrick’s temporary digs, then I rode the train back to Dunfermline, with a bag of cleaning goods — squeegee sticking out the top — and a bin-bag stuffed full of couch-cushions I’d accidentally left when I moved my stuff.

Apparently I tossed and snored all night, but the house here was in a state, with Craig trying at the last minute to get things ready for the movers. (He’s been very busy at the hospital, finishing up his duties to his patients and paperwork.) But, generally, everything about the move has been a success. Moving was a huge task, and one I’ve hated doing in the past, but it all worked out through our taking it one step at a time. Every time I felt overwhelmed by how much there was to do, I just made a list or asked myself, “What’s the next small task?” and did that. And now, in terms of the leaving part, I’m done.

What’s left is the arriving.

Doing my weekly planning session this week, I realised I was starting to feel hesitant about the approaching reality of living in Wick. Of course, with all such things, I just had to tap at the feeling and it opened up. What is this really about?, I asked myself. And what it was about was that I had no picture of what I would actually do up there. Being there was one thing, but what it took to make myself feel more comfortable was brainstorming some of the things I wanted to work on once this moving business was over. I’ve got an idea for a book (different from the other two that have been rolling around in my head, this one more approachable), and there’s bookbinding work I’d like to do… plus a bunch of other stuff.

Of course, none of what I came up with would surprise anyone who’s been paying attention, but I needed to state this stuff.

And now I’m excited.

Okay, and a bit nervous, but at least now I’m also excited.

I’ve had it with the election.

I’ve had it with being told it’s a however-many-horse race, as if somehow the party saying this is in any way convincing me that I should vote for them. On the contrary, I get angry when someone underscores the lack of real freedom or democracy in our electoral system.

And I’m full up to my back teeth with oleaginous, power-craving politicians grinning and spinning their way across every news distribution channel, taking potshots at each other and presuming to say what they’ll do with our money given the chance.

And then there’s the gay thing: I want to scream at the ceiling whenever a politician uses homosexuality to advance his platform, either by pretending to befriend us when it’s convenient (yet making sure we stay in a readily identifiable separate category), or using the fear-stick to point at us and our world-conquering, family-destroying, society-filthying motives.

The latest round of this is Ayrshire’s Conservative candidate airing his view that we’re all on a spectrum from “unfortunate” to “wrong”, and that, if elected, he’d do his best to make sure we don’t “promote” our lifestyles to children. I’m not even going to bother trying to counter that idiot argument; all I can say is that the closest thing I have to a “gay agenda” is a little handmade book in which I schedule to-do items for my work and my social life with my partner (which, as often as not, involves us visiting our straight friends who have babies). Happily, the “nasty party”, alarmed that this thug has said out loud what the rest of them think in private, has suspended him.

I don’t want to promote my personal life to anyone — though Gawd knows it would have helped me when if someone had done that where I could have seen it when I was little. All I want from politicians is that they leave me the hell alone and not abuse gay people to score points. The same goes with the news media, who constantly hit the bee’s nest of intolerance to generate stories from thin air, with no thought of how the ensuing hatred might hurt real people’s lives.

Leaders lead with vision, the unimaginative and despots lead with fear.

I’m halfway through moving house, with all my worldly possessions piled up in a room of Craig’s flat. We leave for our new life this Sunday, and in the meantime everything’s been a bit in limbo — hence the lack of updates here.

We just had a holiday on the Scottish island of Arran — instead of going to Turkey, thanks to one particular volcano in Iceland. I’m more interested in exploring Scotland, though, than taking luxury holidays, so Plan B turned out to be a lovely treat. I’ve posted pictures here, if you’d like to see them.

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I wanted to post something fresh on this blog, so here’s a response I wrote today to a friend’s YouTube video link on Facebook. The video is called The Bechdel Test for Women in Movies, and makes a very strong case that women are generally absent from our culture’s biggest movies. I totally agree with the reviewer’s point, but I think it’s a bit easy to siphon out all our own power by crankily victimising ourselves instead of looking for ways to create our own solutions. So here’s what I wrote:

This test is brilliant, even if the results are sadly unsurprising.

The solution, however, isn’t for “Hollywood” to do something — it can’t change itself, being the very system that generated this situation in the first place.

A far more empowering and authentic solution would be for women with an interest in film to follow the advice of director Spike Lee or the late South African activist Steven Biko and do it yourself.

Why would a white person make movies about black people, Lee, asks, and how could they be truthful? White culture, Biko said, would only create an equality for “white black people”. Real change in power comes from people creating for themselves what they would like to see.

It’s like the horrible British National Party advert that was given airtime on the BBC last night: Nick Griffin wants to blame “them” for all his and his supporters’ failures in life, and people of colour are the easiest “them” to identify. If he really wants British culture to thrive, he should convince people to turn off American TV, stop shopping at multinational chain stores, and actively participate in their local communities. But no, it’s easier to blame someone else.

So, while the reviewer in the video makes a thoroughly convincing point, I would suggest that the solution lies in writing the screenplay she’d like to see instead, and for women to vote with their money at the box office, rather than waiting for commercial film studios to change (or any other huge, money-directed culture-generational engine). Sure, there likely won’t be big-budget blockbuster women-focused movies any time soon, but independent films get made all the time and win lots of respect. And tools are readily available for us to make our own cultural products and share them within our individual communities.

Off the top of my head, I recall Juno, Junebug, and Away We Go as films from the past few years that feature real, thinking, engaging female lead characters. And I’d urge anyone to see the beautiful Me, You, and Everyone We Know, written, directed by, and starring mesmerising performance artist Miranda July.

In this video episode, I demonstrate three ways to make a perfect-bound book.

I spent this Easter weekend with my darling in Paris.

I’ve been to Paris with my parents and with friends from work, both of which were fun, but this was my first time there with a love, and that was sweet. I have to admit, though, that it’s a relief to be home, ’cause visiting with friends of Craig’s, interacting with people in public, even going to a play involved a lot of French, and my French is caveman-bad. I felt so rude and inadequate.

Thank God Craig is so good with languages. He thought he was doing terribly, but he could actually understand people speaking at full speed with us and respond in kind. He’s a wonder!

Of course, in my defence, I haven’t studied French since school, and even then we were taught it in the most technical, non-practical way. The difference between conjugating verbs and speaking fluently is like the difference between looking at a veterinary textbook images of a dog’s innards and playing with a real dog. Plus I’ve been spending the intervening years since school learning to do lots of things other than speak French, and doing them fairly well, I feel, so it’s not like I’m an idiot.

But I felt like an idiot. A willful idiot.

Oh, and apparently there’s something wrong with the economy: the exchange on our British pounds to Euros was about 1:1. That meant dinner each night cost something like 30, 40, or even 50 quid. I’ve never paid that much for a meal in my life before, and I’ve had some pretty good meals. So this trip was one of those times when you have to just suck up a deep breath and figure it’ll all work out in the end.

I made a book for the trip, which we filled out with all the various things we did and saw, and made a note of the people we visited with.

That’ll suffice as our chronicle, and I’ve posted pictures on Facebook. It’s of no use to list all of what we did here, ’cause there’s something about “We went to Paris” that sounds insufferable. Even worse is throwing out place-names with casual familiarity, but for me to do that would be a lie: By the end, my tongue was tripping on every word like its shoelaces were tied together. This was not my place nor my language, just a nice escape for a weekend.

On our last night, we ate take-away food on the banks of the Seine near Notre Dame, then had a long walk that ended with us looking up at the Eiffel Tower from underneath (struggling to avoid the endless crap-merchants with their lit-up whirligigs and Tour-Eiffel keychains), then we crossed over to Trocadéro to look back at it all. I found a picture that shows the view; we stood in the spot where this guy, his pretty boyfriend, and his chauffeur are standing.

Then, as we got on the Métro to go home, I realised I’d lost a little patch of my peripheral vision: A migraine was on its way. I hadn’t had one in a long time and was glad of it, but sure enough, I had one in a few hours. It felt like my head was a gun and my right eye was the bullet, suspended at the point of impact throughout the night. I was well cared-for, though, so by the time we headed out for our flight yesterday, I just had that bruisey old feeling in my skull.

I used to be unsympathetic about migraines, thinking of them as hypochondriacal excuses, but now that I’ve experienced several through the years, I have great empathy for people who suffer with them, and don’t know how they manage.

And I finally got to the Louvre. On our first try, we lined up with a majillion other people: it was the first Sunday of the month, when it’s free to get in. A museum official held up a card saying the wait from that point in the line was four hours, so we left and came back the next day, and got in right away.

We did a whistlestop tour of the place, and I kept thinking of my parents: They joke about our tendency to visit places and just walk around, taking in the street-level life of them but missing the headline tourist sights you’re supposed to see. (While travelling to and from Paris this time, I read about psychogeography and the image of the wandering flâneur, which resonated with the members of my family seem to enjoy travelling most.)

But walking around the museum for several hours, I felt fairly disconnected from the things I saw. All the cherubs and overly flattering portraits, the melodramatically posed mythical figures… These classical commissions to the unimaginably wealthy left me cold. I was more interested in the live people sitting with pensive expressions on their faces or clambering for whatever reason to record their interaction with these iconic pieces of art. I guess I’m not a classical art guy; I remember the Musée d’Orsay feeling much more alive.

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So now I’m back, sitting in the coffeeshop, wearing my red trainers instead of my big boots, which were torturing my feet by the end of the weekend. (What are heels for — especially when you’re already a tall man? It’s like wearing a block of wood on the back of your feet, and gets horribly uncomfortable pretty quickly on a long trip.)

I just had a great chat with one of the nice staff-members here. She’s studying architecture, here from the States with her husband. I love that moment of spark that happens in a conversation with other creative folk, when you both get all lit up because you’re inspired by something the other says or because you can relate to their journey.

The talk started with her asking about the move. This is what’s next: figuring out how to move my stuff. Then I can think about our trip to Turkey later this month. Then the move itself.

It’s a busy time. But good.

In this first video episode, I’ll show you how to print and bind two types of simple books.