Little Green Man

Hi i am writing to you b' coz you have got my name . no not really i just want to know how do you write stories on ABC.com? Thanks jade

Jade Is this his latest? He's been recommended to me but confess I know little about him.

'Xanadu' is stupendous. It's the transcipt of a film he did for BBC2. It's about the Ashfield Valley Estate in Rochdale, a massive high rise estate where the blocks were lettered a throught z. All the other blocks are named after places but X is Xanadu. On the point of being pulled down after turning into the spectacular decaying failure that many similar schemes did, Armitage walks around the estate and muses. It is brilliant, absolutely brilliant. I've got to quote the last page: "We thought of Ashfield and imagined trees; wood smoke, horses and the ricochet of hooves, a meltwater stream like milk from the moors, beehives, birdlife, allotments, a breeze. Like bloodhounds now we track the moment of truth, by which I mean the way we choose to say which quazer tipped the song into a scream, to pinpoint how the pinprick widened into a bruise for you, for me. I'll list the clues the so-called ash, the field, the so-called streets at sixes, sevens, German shephards in their schools of threes of twos, for peace of mind this baseball bat, for sleep these tablets and a certain ratio of booze will count for sheep and see us through. We idle now on waiting lists, and dream of runways, level crossings, traffic queues; waiting to come clean, to break the news of how we live, of what we have seen, of how it leaves us, and what it proves. A light goes green, but nobody moves." The disappointment of those taht were promised the future and it passed them by. Absolutely brilliant. Watch it if it's ever repeated, or get the book from Bloodaxe.