Through rain drifting across floodlight beams and smoke off the hotdog hut from a corner by the Thames you can see through black metal railings through the smog and instant snap of fag ash a distant heap slumped on the floor. Who is it? Please not Houghton or Davies. A medical phenomenon, our hopes to […]

The day the leaflets came, election sludge we slip into like a soft play ball park, they promised us all a new start. The current incumbent wouldn’t smile, just said ‘It’s strange how all these missiles fly’ and how all my calls get emoticon laughs. The day the leaflets came, I couldn’t distinguish all the […]

The first is the Hollywood, lofted or hooked thirty yards from its target’s foot over an advertising board for East Neuk Salt. The second is the slide rule from a vision barely peripheral – a pitch for heaven in the eye of a needle. The third is a clip down the line you didn’t want […]

‘Be quiet; the weather’s on the night news.’ Stephen Malkmus, Watery, Domestic Cirrus never whispers, or was that Texas? What you really meant was cumulonimbus with deep grey future rain around its base. How it was heaving, piled up like a mountain range, future stories blurred in heaviness through the onrush of torrential rain. Mystic […]

On this island, is it Saints or Pompey, what do you say? Don’t ask me, my friend; I’m a Bournemouth fan from Alum Bay. When you look north, from Cowes, or east, from Ryde, I’m around the headland at Chilton Chine. No Spithead, Solent: It’s the channel west on sunset tides from Brightstone Bay to […]