A detail from the cover of the Raconteur supplement on prostate cancer

There’s nothing cheery about prostate cancer, I thought to myself as I began to research my second article for Raconteur. But as I began to research mortality and treatment, I discovered how widespread the cancer was, and how long a man can survive with it when the cancer is localised (inside the gland).

The supplement was published in the Times yesterday, just in time to remind men to grow a sponsored moustache for the Prostate Cancer Charity. Click here to find out more about the cause behind ‘Movember’ – moustachioed November – and meet Chris, the man who was kind enough to talk me through his experience of surviving the disease (p. 8-9).

Is Wapping Bookshop London’s smallest?

The greenhouse holds fewer than 300 books and magazines, ranging from the bookseller’s own literary review to limited edition collectable photography books. Shoppers can stand next to the few shelves or sit down on the garden bench stationed opposite. Manager, buyer and salesman Ben Eastham turns the wood-burning stove on in the winter, and moves outside onto the lawn in the summer. The bookshop is part of the Wapping Project, a gallery and restaurant housed in a former power station.

The bookshop stock is a world away from the long tail that Amazon offers.Because space is a premium, you’re more likely to find five copies of the most talked-about hardbacks than random secondhand offerings or stacks of paperback Booker nominees. For example, Ben says,

“One of our bestsellers was the Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre that was a £75 very beautiful edition from Steidl, which was very beautiful and made on a short run, which people buy to collect. That sold very well.”

He also hosts readings and talks – for audiences of just eight to 12 – and when the weather’s better there are film screenings projected onto the brick wall beside the greenhouse. I defy you to find anywhere more bijou.

With thanks to Ben Eastham. Originally published on Londonist. Wapping Bookshop can be found on Wapping Wall, E1W 3ST.

I was lucky enough to get the chance to have my work in a Times supplement today. Cardiovascular disease is a major problem for Britain at the moment, increasingly so for women, so if you want to know more, you can flick through the supplement by clicking on the cover above.

Carrie Bradshaw was used to being dumped in picturesque city locations

I’ve left my book in London. It’s a good book, one I’m sorry to see go and one that most passers-by will probably want to shred with their teeth. I gave it away to a stranger, but they haven’t even noticed it yet.

Around the UK, thousands of naive and dreamy readers like myself will be slotting their favourite paperbacks into grocery shelves, bike baskets, Tesco trolleys, phone boxes, pub gardens, on park benches, under the shadow of King’s College and anywhere else that’s out of the rain. The Guardian Bookswap is very similar to previous bookdrop/find movements such as Book Crossing. But the big media brand behind it, and the one-off nature of the event, mean that it’s a high-impact campaign. It’s also thoughtfully curated – asking for pictures, locations, tagged tweets and even book reviews means that readers will feel engaged and involved.

A picture of my #guardianbookswap drop - Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell outside London Fashion Week

My book, as you will see from the Flickr map, is Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell. I made my apologies in the dust jacket so I won’t repeat myself here. I walked along the river last night, watching flash bulbs exploded in the dark windows of Somerset House, and left it on a table outside London Fashion Week HQ. I hope an SATC-loving stylist picks it up after a hard day at the shows.

As the campaign heats up, you can look for left books yourself – joining in the other half of the campaign by geotagging and uploading your pics to the ‘found’ flickr map. If you’ve left or found a book, leave a comment below.

See more of my books blogs here.

I was privileged to interview Pulse’s guest editor about why she wanted us to investigate those issues, and how the NHS reforms are changing the way we’re treated – click here to watch.

Since then I’ve picked up a host of new skills and polished some older ones too. I was confident writing news round-ups, but I was no Kathryn Bigelow behind the camera. I was delighted to be given the reins over Pulse’s social media strategy – including a Twitter account with 3,000+ followers – but I’d never built a customer-facing website before.

Over the last two months I’ve sent e-newsletters, reported, tweeted, filmed, liveblogged, commissioned, produced timelines, managed a Facebook page and designed web pages.

I loved being a feature-writer – the interview with David Shrigley, the press trip to Porto – but it’s great to be creating  digital content again.

The reading room. Photo: Jail Make.

A promo campaign for David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet has launched in a pop-up tea house in Spitalfields market, East London – I caught up with him hours after his first visit.

The pop-up’s more rough and ready than Mitchell imagined but he was excited to see it realised. “It’s much more comfortable upholstery than you’d get in Japan – there, you’d be on the floor, so maybe this is a necessary compromise. There’s a bit of artwork on the wall from the book – my mum did it and I paid her with a hug. Is that a bit Spinal Tap?”

But for Mitchell the most beautiful thing in there is the light. In Japan they use paper on wooden frames called shoji – the pop-up’s made of a similar structure with plastic instead of paper to make it more resilient.  “It gives it a lovely strange trnaslucent glow inside,” he said.

The pop-up was created to give readers an immersive experience of a Japanese room, similar to that of the novel’s setting, Dejima.

“Dejima was interesting for the Japanese and the Dutch – for the Japanese because it was their only contact with, almost extra terrestrials, and for the Dutch it was a kind of trophy – no other nation was allowed to be there.”

The reading room includes leaves from a notebook he used when planning The Thousand Autumns as well as prints of Dejima that formed part of his research.

The tea room’s like an artefact, he says: “We’re not trying to make an existential point, but in a way a book is like a room – if it’s well-built, you forget what’s going on outside for a while.”

Cover: Joe Wilson for Hodder

David’s favourite place to read? “At my house in Clonakilty, we’ve got an upstairs conservatory that gets warm in the sunshine. It’s got a big armchair in it with flat arms where I can balance my cup of tea – I make the most of it until my sons come running in.”

And naturally, for a man who’s spent years in England, Japan and Ireland, he’s a big tea drinker and confesses to collecting loose leaf blends. Does 25 jars constitute an obsession? Perhaps.

The reading room is open for four days from Tuesday 15 to Friday 18 March near Lamb Street, Old Spitalfields Market; it is free to get in. The tea-room is part of a wider campaign to source 1000 reviews of Mitchell’s novel, for more info see @1000autumns.

You can read both those articles online,

in the online magazine: [Reinier de Graaf/John Hopkins]

or on the website: [Reinier de Graaf/John Hopkins]

Strelka Institute, Moscow. Photo: OMA

David Shrigley. Photo: Boo Lee

An interview with David Shrigley at this year’s Frieze Art Fair became a feature on the artist’s weird and witty book art.

And a press trip to a new wine hotel in Porto, plus a chat with the UK’s second ever Master of Wine, explains a lot about why port’s back on the British dining table.

Taylor's tawny port lodge, pipes and vat. Photo: Taylor Fladgate

Fancy reading more of articles on books and drinks? Check out my bars blog, Knees Up Mother Brown, read my preview of new East London speakeasy The Nightjar, or discover the latest indie novel picked up by the mainstream.

Giles Looker, Rebekkah Dooley and Alex Kammerling judge the LCS shakeology comp

The London Cocktail Society was just four months old when it threw its first Christmas party, but it had already made an impression with bars and drinks brands in the UK.

Not only are all of its members cocktail-curious and passionate about quality, many are keen journalists, PRs, marketers and bloggers.

Find out how the society organised its word-of-mouth clout over at Barlife UK.

Want to find out more? You can read the blog post below.

The BBC, one of Marion Beke's cocktails for The Nightjar. Photo: Bruno Drummond

There’s a brand new secret on Old Street, and this speakeasy will change the game for East London bars…

The Nightjar is a passion project from Edmund Weil and his partner Roisin Stimpson. Edmund acts as general manager of the venue while Roisin runs the music and entertainment side; the pair is supported by bar manager Marian Beke and their Shaker-School-trained bartenders.

While Marian has bar experience at Montgomery Place and Artesian at the Langham Hotel, Edmund is a relative newcomer and spent just one year at Shoreditch House learning the ropes. (He was previously an English teacher and a PR)

I have no doubt that the bar will be a magnetic jazz and cabaret venue when it launches. But what kncked my socks off was the cocktail menu. When I met Edmund and Roisin on Friday night, I was lucky enough to be talked through their entire menu and the cocktail geek in me was bowled over.

The most eye-catching must be the BBC – one of Marian Beke’s competition-winning arrangements, the Sazerac-alike is served in a waft of absinthe smoke from the bar’s ‘smoking gun’.

Their aged pina colada looks like a must-try: two rums, fresh coconut milk and pineapple juice spend a week wrapped up in a barrel before the cocktail’s served.

Bespoke Ingredients

Lots of cocktails are made with the bar’s own liqueurs, bitters and infusions. The Name of the Samurai, for instance, has a ginger and raisin infused sake; there is also a blood orange and saffron liqueuer, a prune and Belgian truffle liqueurs and unique ‘electric bitters’ made from chilli-flowers in their signature drink.

The thing that caught my eye on the menu was a Silk Stockings made with Earl Grey-infused condensed milk – this creativity is, at the moment, the preserve of just a couple of bars outside of SoHo.

It’s also deeply authentic, right down to the Hemingway cocktail taken straight from Islands in the Stream.

For me it’s another sign that the East End’s the new West End – something Anna and Heather from the Queen of Hoxton mentioned a year ago. Certainly, Edmund compared the cocktail menu to Purl’s and Nightjar’s smoking cocktail has a whiff of the Fixer Upper about it… Does it bother you to lose grungy venues (The Foundry, Victoria’s), or will you welcome Nightjar with open arms?

Most of my friends love discovering new novelists as much as we love finding new bands, bars and film stars. And yet while we can rattle off a list of indie record labels quicker than you could say ‘Sub Pop’, when it comes to publishers we’re not so knowledgeable.

“Ah,” you say, “that’s why we have big publishing houses like HarperCollins to pick out the outstanding stuff from smaller outfits.” Of course you’re right – and in the same way, I love it when Annie Mac or Rough Trade showcase new talent.

But there’s nothing like stumbling over a gem. The Bright Young Things books aren’t out yet, but you can get them as trade paperbacks or e-books from Thursday 17 September. JP’s is a thriller called Hereditation; you can get tasters of that and the other three on the Bright Young Things site.

Have you read any good novels from indie publishers lately? Or any good literary mags?

The Bookseller: Parthian publishes Bright Young Things | All my Bookseller stories | Bright Young Things site

If you’ve been reading the papers closely over the past few months, you will have noticed that Adrian Chiles and Christine are no longer presenting The One Show (BBC One, 7pm). I know! Tragedy! But don’t worry. Cheeky Northerner Jason Manford and Bleakley look-a-like Alex Jones are the latest combo on the couch.

Rather adorably, Jason adorably made name badges for the first show – just in case, y’know, you wondered when Adrian starting dyeing his hair. The atmosphere’s relaxed, and sofa chat about wild Scottish beavers gets a giggle out of studio guest Whoopi Goldberg.

Alex’s performance was as shiny and smooth as her bob, but she can’t help but charm us couch potatoes with her lovely Welsh patter. And her co-host’s dry sense of humour is not a world away from Chiles’s.

But do these two become One? To be honest, if you had a couple of G&Ts before the show you might not notice the difference. It’s early days for the new presenters, but we think The One Show is still the best viewing for TV dinners.

Monday’s show on iPlayer

This month I was lucky enough to spend two weeks at the TV industry’s favourite B2B magazine Broadcast. It was great to be a part of the team, even in a quiet month like August, and I was given plenty of interesting articles.

My favourite moments included interviewing Matt Edmondson for the Webwatch feature, and hearing from the hilarious Graham Linehan at a debate about piracy. If you’d like to read anything I wrote for the web in this period – and have a Broadcast login! – follow the link.