Small? Far Away.

Greenland. Day 9: Wrestling.

I stayed indoors and got some work done today, slowly plucking out a few hundred more words to put towards a couple of short stories and doing some tinkering with the next chapbook. I learned stuff about Delacroix, including how much he was influenced by English painters. I…

General Election

I was reading Cendrars this morning, on the tube, like you do

if you still harbour childhood fantasies of becoming French at the age of fifty-three, a real poet with a jaunty cap and a scarf and Gitanes, or if you still harbour childhood fantasies of finding meaning and…

Enfiewd

Enfield, NC.[/caption]

Of course, you wonder who named this place. You wonder why they left the old place. And you…

Uber

They say to me:

• If we’re going to smile at the sun, we should also smile at the rain.
• You let too many refugees in here. They are criminals. Look at those two over there, they don’t work, these people, they just sell drugs and fight. This is why we must learn…

Greenland. Day 11: True Love Ways

Nothing to do with Greenland but this came on the radio this morning and reached out to me through the railings of the autotuned playground of dodgy, poppy hip hop and Greenlandic cover versions of Queen songs. I was pulled back to being eleven, to starting secondary…

Baker Street

The maroon-jacketed barbers have clearly spent the morning Brylcreeming themselves in preparation. The pictures on their wall — Gregory and Rock and the first Darren from Bewitched — greet us with sneeringly-slick Hollywood sparkle. It’s the bloke who looks like that wise Irish sergeant from Z Cars doing…

White (From Something About England, December 2010)

I scraped the snow from the weather-buried car this morning, opened the door,
sat down in the driver’s seat. For a couple of minutes, there was no traffic,
no sound: a pre-industrial peace. The calm stillness was pricked, suddenly, by a…

Balaclava

Blue, fluffy, two sizes two small, I wore it every morning for a while, looking like a very small, uncertain IRA man, though I like to think now I made balaclavas cool long before terrorists did. Bafflingly, its unbelievable itchiness, its Napoleonic harshness, the way it made me almost unrecognisable but…