Monday 16 April Tonight was the first and last date with Geoff. 43 solid minutes I listened to him droning on at one point. I texted Jules at 7:01 telling her he’d just started talking about mushrooms and at 7:44 he was still going. Who knew there was so much to learn? Apparently, he recently Read More
We left the train station and turned right, towards the river Tilt. Close to the track we found a shop and a public toilet, for one last stop before heading up the valley. Mark bought an apple and a block of chocolate. I found an off-brand sports drink in the fridge and gulped it all. Read More
For long after dark and before first light a clamorous pair of oystercatchers courts in an echoing circumference of air and sky. Anxiously they whoop and wheel by day, by night. The repetitions mean that she’s in season and will concede his ancient cry that seed should not be lost. Makeshift, a nest will be Read More
Stung by winter’s salt and grit his cold paws barely grip the icy pavement still he won’t cross to the sunny side, hangs his head when I reach out to tug his collar, leans away from me, his body a counterweight keeping us both upright on the ice linked by my outstretched arm, my hold Read More
Find as far inland as Kintyre can allow, map back to an almost-anywhere dot. Out of seasight. Still, on clouded nights, watch Rathlin’s lit pattern censer past. A little industrial structure. One bog-footed cave built for burning. All rabbit shit, trotting-in lost sheep, broken curves open to host brackening rain. A dripped-on Alice, shrunk on Read More
Patron Saint of Disappointing Children Praise to this book, now heavy with scurf, pages moist with the persistence of must, your words still breathing, though only just on the bowed shelves of the house of your birth. Praise to the dynasty of something and nothing, the house of which you one day will be head, Read More
I read these words over the shoulder of someone reading it the other day on the tube: “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.” Franz Kafka. It made me laugh, and the person who was reading it looked up, and we both smiled at each other. Perhaps that other person was a writer too? Read More
language – mass noun 1. The method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way. 2. A system of communication used by a particular country or community. 3. The style of a piece of writing or speech. The version of me that exists Read More
When you are a child born in one place and raised in another, ‘home’ is complicated. Even more so, when ‘home’ is a series of couches, hotel rooms, borrowed apartments, and rented houses. ‘Home’ is something that belongs to your mother, gifted to you through pictures and stories, the folklore of her youth. It is Read More
“in pre-capitalist Europe women’s subordination to men had been tempered by the fact that they had access to the commons and other communal assets, while in the new capitalist regime women themselves became the commons, as their work was defined as a natural resource, laying outside the sphere of market relations.” Silvia Federici mothering sunday mothered nothing Read More