Join us at End of the Road Festival

Photo: Liz Seabrook

Having groggily crawled out of your tent (still caked in glitter from Bat for Lashes the night before), found a nice cup of tea and bacon buttie, you find yourself feeling slightly astray. The bands haven’t started yet and your friends are yet to surface. You realise you're missing something: a magazine.

For a second year, we’ve hand-picked a selection of wonderful independent magazines to bring with us to End of the Road, taking place from 2 to 4 September in Dorset. Nestled in the woods on the festival grounds, you'll be able to come and stretch out with one or two to read and chat to us about mags.

We'll also have an activity happening at 1pm each day:

Friday 2 September: our lifestyle editor and photographer, Liz Seabrook will be running a portrait photography workshop. She'll run through the basics of how to compose a portrait and how to help your subject feel more comfortable, before sending you off with a special assignment around the festival ground. If you'd like to get involved, bring a camera! It can be digital, instant, analogue or a camera phone, anything that makes an image!

Saturday 3 September: Our friends at LWLies are joining us for the weekend, and will be bringing along a Movie and Music quiz. Their quizzes are known for being a little fiendish at times, so make sure you swot up ahead of schedule. 

Sunday 4 September: Ever thought of making your own magazine? We'll be talking about how to go about it, the importance of honing a niche and the problems that often crop up along the way. Bring questions in your well-thumbed reporters notebook, zines for show and tell and a healthy sense of curiosity.

Photo: Liz Seabrook

We’ll also be running real life version of our regular Twitter feature, #onegoodthing, handing out little slices of gloriousness. We'll have pens and paper with us, so if you like, you can return the favour and tell us what little moment fills you to the brim with joy.

So come and find us, read a little, chat some and tell us something good; we can’t wait to meet you. 

Ps. Tickets are still on sale and the line-up is A.M.A.Z.I.N.G. Come and join in the fun!

Culture Monday

In a world where there's always so much to see, how do you decide what to do? Toss a coin? Close your eyes and take a stab at an art listing? If you're a fan of letting fate decide your activity, we're putting together a list of some of our top culture picks each week, starting today. Aren't you pleased to have stumbled on us?

Mona Hatoum

Art
- Mona Hatoum @ Tate Modern (Until 21 August 2016)
- Jamaican Pulse: Art and Politics from Jamaica and the Diaspora @ The RWA, Bristol (until 11 September 2016)

Music
- Green Man Festival, Brecon Beacons, Wales (18 - 21 August 2016) 
- Caught by the River, Fulham Palace, London (6-7 August 2016) 

Film
- Sid and Nancy (re-released 5 August in selected cinemas nationwide)

Theatre
- Heartbreak Productions, various open-air locations nationwide throughout August and September.
- Alison Thea Skot and Rachel Parris' respective shows @ Edinburgh Fringe Festival (5 August until 29 August 2016)
- Eisteddfod, Castle Meadows, Abergavenny (until 6 August 2016) 

Workshops
- Mark Pawson, Instant Publication Workshop @ Spike Island, Bristol (Saturday 13 August)

Show us where you've been and tell us what we should include in next week's round-up via our Twitter or Instagram.

What we're reading: Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

In our adventure issue, we wrote about books we read while visiting the place they were set: London, The Cairngorms, the French Riviera and Toronto. But there were plenty of loved tomes we couldn't squeeze onto our pages. Here's one said outtake. Not read where it was set, but read on the move. Which is, more often than not in the busy city we're based in, where we do the bulk of our reading. Our lifestyle editor Liz Seabrook shares her thoughts on Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.

It took me a little over four months to read Midnight’s Children. I realise this doesn’t sound overwhelmingly positive, but let me explain. I can only read when in transit, and – as I usually cycle – sitting still with nothing to do is a rare luxury. My time spent with my nose among pages tends to be limited. 

Midnight’s Children tells the story of three generations of a family, starting with the conception of the protagonist’s parents, to his own conception and his life up until it catches up with his present day. The history of India and Pakistan are charted alongside personal histories, journeys are taken, houses are moved out of and people are lost. The plot – though for the most part chronological – is dense and interwoven with heady descriptions that conjure each and every scene in technicolour. 

In the course of reading the book, I broke up with my long-term boyfriend, saw my sister graduate, travelled through the Alps to Austria to visit an old friend and made new friends who I’ve since lost touch with. For those four months, I had a much needed travelling companion in the shape of a midnight blue, 500 or so page paperback. In that time our stories intertwined; as I sat curled up in a train carriage in Austria with Sigur Ros playing in my ears, my mind was transported to watching a boy in Bombay cycle about trying to impress a girl six months older than him. 

As I turned the last page, my heart sank; I was losing a friend. I didn’t start to read another book for a while after that. Partly because I was back in London, riding around, but partly because I was scared nothing would measure up. I’m still unsure if anything has. 

Image and Words: Liz Seabrook

To read about literary adventures from Canada to the Cairngorms (via Fitzgerald's French Riviera), and find out why on earth we were reading 50 Shades of Grey in 2016, grab a copy of Issue 31 here.