boxing day

Bicycle in mud.
Monitor in mud.
Putney from Fulham.
We went past Fulham football ground, where a man was fighting repeatedly with security guards who were trying to throw him out. He would shout “Hey!” in a surprised voice, as if they had attacked him without warning; then, when they left him in the street & went back [...]

“wide-eyed, we enter the rook-black night”

Roger Deakin has a fluid perseverance. You don’t read him, you listen to him. He murmurs & chuckles away, with many diversions & quotes, all day & night. It’s like being camped near a stream. He will not just describe “layers of vapour” hanging “in the new shoots of the hazel coppice”; he will remind [...]

read this book

Rather than writing, David Constantine seems to perform an act of visualisation on the reader’s behalf; what he makes us see is matter-of-fact but at the same time somehow light, unmoored and thoroughly poetic. His stories are evidence. Everyone in them is a witness, sometimes to a death, more often to a birth; sometimes, to [...]

a time in spain

Underground parking structure, Urbanisation Sur, Valencia.

Architectural detail, Urbanisation Sur.

Objects, Urbanisation Sur.

Welcome to Vegas, Don Jilton 24 horas a su servicio.

Hulk, Pego

Other discarded objects, Pego.

Discarded Renault 4, Benirrama.

this is not quite the real october I imagined

It’s warm & wet. Five crows rollick down the middle of Grove Road about twenty feet up, tumbling & mock-fighting. My latest autumn spider sits under the lead in the top righthand window corner, glumly watching her web sag into strings & long hexagons in the rain, the way her mother, grandmother & great grandmother [...]

running down

September. The season can’t make up its mind. Will it clutch at summer or declare the death of history & move on ? I remembered that running always gets harder for me in September. Even at 30-odd, with the whole Peak District outside my front door (to be strict, my only door at that time), [...]

acts of enclosure

Though not much of a swimmer, I was interested in this until I saw their caps, which reminded me of this. More Acts of Enclosure in the new style, in which an activity open to any human being–going for a swim, going for a paddle, moving for pleasure in a landscape–is repackaged & generously returned [...]

gardens

I like gardens, but I suspect them too. Gardens pretend to be outside, but their secret is that they are not. A garden is a place you can’t have, a state that doesn’t exist. It’s a door that won’t open. The sightlines of gardens are designed not to deliver, designed to promise precisely what’s not–precisely [...]

creationist day out

Ken MacLeod illustrates this blog entry on creationism with a picture of some people out for a day’s coasteering & DWS-lite somewhere in Pembroke. It’s a pity the photographer has made them seem so wooden. But they’re clearly having a good time.

fear & loathing by the rochdale canal

She has so many emails from writers, the bookshop owner says, that sometimes it’s hard to get any work done at all! In those few words the Calder Valley clamps down on you as relentlessly as it did on any Victorian loom operator & you’re deformed instantly by some geographic-claustrophobic metaphor for the whole Ted [...]