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We said goodbye to The Pie today. She was 13. Megan – immediately dubbed The Pie by my wife – was born in 2005 and we got her in early 2006. We were young marrieds, starting a new life in suburbia. For a couple of years it was just the three of us: me, my… [more]
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Cerian Jenkins is one of my favourite writers, both in her day job as a columnist for DIVA magazine and as a blogger. In The [Other] C Word she’s been blogging about her experiences of cancer treatment, both in terms of the physical effects and the wider impacts on her life. This post, on friendship,… [more]
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It’s Sunday, the day when the UK press likes to post multiple anti-trans articles. I want to look at one from last week. It’s the story that virulently anti-trans MP David Davies described on Twitter as the “latest example of barking mad trans-activism”: the idea that eight-year-old boys will be told they can have periods.… [more]
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One of the biggest things I’ve learnt over the last couple of years is that there is often a very big difference between the world as it is and the world as you perceive it to be. For example, on a personal level the world is a lot less scary, a lot more inclusive and… [more]
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I wrote a Christmas song! I love (some) Christmas songs, and I particularly love U2’s cover of Baby Please Come Home. It’s got a real joy to it: where so many Christmas songs are dirges it’s got a propulsive energy that really appeals to me (as does Mariah’s All I Want For Christmas Is You,… [more]
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It’s my birthday today. I know I had a birthday last month, but like all good queens I’ve got two: my birthday and the day I became Carrie. Legally speaking, that change happened on this day last year. I usually post a round-up just before Christmas, and last year’s one just happened to be the… [more]
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Have you seen the gender neutral Santa story? Of course you have. It’s been everywhere. The tale that 1/4 of people want a gender neutral Santa has appeared in my news feeds so often I could recite it from memory, so I will. A new study found that 25% or 26% or 27% of people… [more]
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Ghostwriting is a very odd thing to do for money. I’ve done quite a lot of it, from ghostwriting entire books to writing public statements and blog posts in character as various executive types. I’m good at it, but it’s a weird gig – especially in books, where the pay doesn’t really reflect the amount… [more]
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One of my favourite musical jokes goes something like this. A guitarist is on stage and puts one guitar down to pick up another. “Oh, good,” the audience thinks. “Everything’s going to sound so different now!” I find it funny because it’s true: while there are sound reasons for swapping guitars on stage (to get… [more]
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This week, The New York Times made a podcast called “The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, and How We Missed It”. Esquire’s Charles P Pierce is not amused: who, exactly, does the NYT mean by “we”? To take the simplest argument first, “we,” of course, did no such thing, unless “we” is a very limited—and very… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
