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
Long Fiction
Chapter Three – Adventures with a Narcissist
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
Chapter Three – The Long Friday Night
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
Chapter Two – Adventures with a Narcissist
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
Chapter One – Adventures with a Narcissist
My first year in Leeds was hard. I chose to move here because it was where everything was happening with the music I was into. I loved going out in Leeds, and I’d met a lot of sound people at parties, but actually living in this city, before I’d really made it my home, wasn’t … Read More
Chapter Two – The Long Friday Night
After the cider, we headed into town. The sky was a dark, inky blue, at the very last stage of twilight. It was a nice night, warm for late April, and we walked along smoking and chatting. There were a few stars out and I thought about the vastness of space and how remote everything … Read More
Chapter One – The Long Friday Night
For me, back then, the weekend always began at around four-thirty on a Friday night, the moment I stepped through my front door after college. Things generally followed a similar pattern every week, but at the same time, no weekend was quite like any other. You always knew that something interesting and ridiculous was going … Read More
About The Long Friday Night
When I was in my teens, I wrote a novel. It just came to me, as a fully-formed idea, and I wrote it over a few days, in a room full of people who probably thought I was doing my coursework. I didn’t do anything with it, and I didn’t know, or even care much, … Read More