Camden Lock
“I walked to Oxford Circus yesterday. Joined the canal at the bottom of Agar Grove. Reclaimed the city as only walking can. It is neither as big nor as scary as it appears.”
Browsing: The Idler
Day of the Jackass: Jonesy Meets Nick Clegg
“I could stab him with a cocktail stick! I’d go down in history as the man who attacked the Deputy Prime Minster with a buffet accessory.” Jonesy meets Nick Clegg in Whitehall. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear…
How to Date a Goddess
You have snagged yourself a Valentine’s date with a beautiful, mysterious, curvaceous bundle of trouble. What’s an intelligent, urbane man about town to do by way of preparation? A few words of advice from Lady Lavinia…
Short Fiction: Brown Lake
“Frank had been swimming ever since he could remember. His parents had owned a house down by the waterfront in Mosman, inside Sydney’s great Harbour…”
Nineteen and Fighting
Unless you are over 90 you will not have personal experience of fighting in a World War. To help us understand, Brain Hemingway shares extracts from the World War II diaries of his father Paddy, fighting in the RAF.
The Broken King
The sun periodically burned through the blanket of cloud so I chanced an outside table at one of the cafés on Swain’s Lane. I sat, looking enviously over at the well-heeled diners tucking into mountainous salads at Kalendar and Café Mozart.
Short Fiction: The Phone Call
“This is The Salter Programme.” The voice was British, educated, with a working class burr. “I am calling from Tokyo, and want to inform you that your film script has been selected by our cultural exchange programme.”
Forty
I went to a 40th birthday party last Saturday. It was full of stupid, sleazy media types braying like donkeys, desperate to be liked, to be younger than they were, to be thought of as important, to be everything other than what they were.
Sex, Vogue & DC10
The sun sets in Ibiza at around 9.57pm, and as the moon comes up so do I, surrounded by a rush and heaving mass of vibrating bass, boom, boom, boom and in my head there, I go, you, me, I, he, all at once.
Haggis
As I passed below the mysterious Chanctonbury Ring, an Iron Age hill fort planted with a copse of beech trees bent north-east by the prevailing wind, I saw a figure stop at the gate I was approaching. He was waiting for me…
Short Fiction: Cigar
In the depths of my sleep, a niggle prompts me to turn over, and the resulting disarrangement causes me to frown in annoyance. I am now aware of my retina, and the daylight penetrating the thin membrane of my closed eyelid.
While You Were Asleep
Miss York is back with her sharpened pencil, musing late at night about words in our lexicon suffering the lash of society’s truculent tongue. To sleep, perchance to dream; ay, there’s the rub…