It rained all summer the year Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein and Polidori wrote The Vampyre This year I have wondered if it will ever stop raining and I, for sure have had my share of monsters and bloodsucking beasts Some people will steal your soul to fill a void but that is their tragedy and … Read More
It’s not like it used to be You say Back in that long distant day Still, you get by You tread on, you cope and what you really miss is hope
I’d known Paul for years. Sitting in Mike Whitton’s kitchen, laughing about it all, it struck me how long ago it all was now. I wondered how Paul’s relationship with drugs was going. I remembered that we all used to joke that he could sniff a line from five miles away. Before he met Jackie, … Read More
It was nine on Sunday morning, and me and Mike Whitton had been up all night. We were drinking neat gin, straight from the bottle. That started out as a joke because we’d run out of rum, but we accidentally did the whole bottle in. Our reminiscences about Paul and Jackie had turned into a … Read More
You buy your spirituality from a vending machine outside the Supermarket of Zen where you meditate self-consciously for your Instagram profile The search for inner peace is a constant battle but you are mindful and enlightened; it says so on the tin.
I stared across the room. Before The Brewery was The Brewery, it was LA’s; a dark, dingy nightclub with black walls and a sticky black floor. It got closed down in the end, because it was notorious for drugs, fights and never IDing anyone – even if they were obviously about ten. The only way … Read More
The sinister Alexa device on the side asks frivolous questions: What cheese can you live in? I wonder? It offers recipes: A vegan pasta dish Spring salad Your parcel was delivered yesterday Another will arrive on Thursday you are told Outside, the trees in the distance still have their winter shapes Comforting against a white … Read More
My life in Leeds has taken me to all sorts of places, and eventually it took me to living on my friends’ sofa during lockdown. That wasn’t as bad as it sounds. In fact, it was the happiest I’d been in a long time. The weekend before they relaxed the lockdown rules, I headed back … Read More
A summer flu ‘Two days of horror’ was how I described it to a friend, who, it turned out, had just the same It wasn’t covid I’d had that a couple of weeks before The two days of horror was much worse I couldn’t breathe too well, and although it was the hottest weekend of … Read More
I remember this place Years ago Slow rain almost hanging in the air and half dead pot plants in windows Cars drone past through the grey days with no light