The Blog is BACK! - (and now I’m a Guest Blogger too)

It seems quite frightening to realise that I haven’t posted up a blog here for three months.

What happened?….. A combination of things:-

- To be honest, most of the time I’ve simply been out there in the real world just living a life (it’s not bad out there, apart from the bloody weather), and besides I got a bit lazy!…

- media-wise it all got a bit frantic: after decades away from it, I sort-of fell back into doing bits of background artiste / extras work in tv and films…first on Midsomer Murders (the episode Noble Art that went out in October 2010), then on Pirates Of The Caribbean (4): On Stranger Tides (yes, I did do a few days with Mr. Depp) and then, without a pause for breath, straight onto the latest Martin Scorsese movie The Invention Of Hugo Cabret working alongside Ben Kingsley (you’ll just have to wait ‘n’ see how much). I shall inevitably be blogging about these exploits in due course…

- I must admit I also got a bit ticked off with Blogspot changing a little their settings for posting up blogs - nothing major, just annoying little things that really piss you off and you have to pointlessly re-learn things all over again. [It’s a disease that notably afflicts sites like Facebook and MySpace: changing formats just for the sake of change; I guess these people do it to attempt to justify their exorbitant salaries. Hey Buddy, listen up, try this one: if it Ain’t Broke, DON’T Fix it!]

- and now (January 2011) Hodders, my publishers, want me to update and expand (considerably) my book Teach Yourself Screenwriting for a new edition due out in July/August, and to be retitled Break Into Screenwriting (a Teach Yourself book)…I mean, it's been a best-seller for fifteen years, just why they've decided to change things...what was that I said about ‘if it ain’t broke….’ ?

…So what made me apply the seat of my pants to the seat of the blogging chair again? Well, a few days ago my pals Matt and Enrique at www.FineandDandyShop.com asked me to contribute a guest blog to their site. 

They had noticed that UK GQ had done a “50 Best Dressed Men in Britain”. 

http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/style/articles/2011-01/03/gq-style-news-best-dressed-men-in-britain/2010-2011

And asked me to come up with my own list of Stylish Men.
I took a look at the GQ list and realised:
- a third of them I had never heard of,
- a third were somewhat scruffy buggers (to say the least),
- and only the remaining third were what you might call borderline acceptable.

I didn’t feel exactly stretched to come up with a riposte. So I just went to the local coffee shop, sat down for a bit and just created a list of chaps I know / admire / fancy who are on the cusp of ‘breaking bigger’ into the public eye whom I regarded rather stylish and classy.

And these are the ones that came into my mind, pretty much in the order they arrived:

http://fineanddandyshop.blogspot.com/2011/01/dandys-list-of-15-most-dapper-men.html

I hope you liked them (and my reasons for choosing them). If you disagree with the names, tuff - I like annoying people. 

[Naturally, since publishing this list, I’ve thought of plenty of faces I have overlooked. Maybe next year]. The good news is that FineandDandyShop have asked me to be a regular guest blogger…in which case, I guess I had better get my s**t together…I have a few ideas. (Naturally, I will cross-post and cross-reference).

- And I guess I had better start blogging here again. Hold onto your hats…and bow ties!

…Oh, and I shaved my moustache off yesterday……