Tag Archives: autobiographical notes
on the rock island line
When I was young we had three shelves of books. I remember Little Brother to the Bear and Coral Island. Most of the rest were popular military histories. World War Two was still alive in our house: my father had … Continue reading
polypropylene
What I liked about Climbers was its one-to-one relationship with stuff. My first climbing rope was braided polyprop. They told us: don’t, whatever you do, buy a polypropylene rope & top-rope on it. So we all went out & got … Continue reading
Filed under climbers, lost & found
friday 13th
Every morning between nine and ten, especially if it’s raining, Barnes is full of diesel Renaults & Peugots, minicabs called to the high rise flats around the pond. The drivers, who won’t get out of their cars, switch off their … Continue reading
Filed under predicting the present
we’ve all wanted to do it
Robert Ferrigno: “Time was compressing into a dense moment, an instant around which the rest of their lives would revolve.”* I flash on something from childhood, some feeling, too brief to identify, of entrapment by one’s own choice. Writers write … Continue reading
Comments Off
Filed under crime, ghosts, predicting the present, writing
your skin is not so tough
Some stories have such an excessive sentimentality that as soon as you’ve finished writing them you’re ashamed & wish you hadn’t; in fifteen years time you see their value. Other stories feel hard & pure at time of writing but … Continue reading
Filed under lost & found, writing
in the garden
The robins don’t want the goldfinches on the niger seed dispenser–too close to their nest. A pair of blackbirds, prospecting the thick ivy further along that wall, don’t want them either. The goldfinches enact “puzzled”, “good-natured” & “unprepared to squabble”. … Continue reading
Comments Off
Filed under landscape
swords of the infinite
I had to explain recently that I don’t have an archive, or any papers. Unless someone can track down the rental housing in which I left deposits of a few hundred books & two or three mouldering Eastlight boxfiles at … Continue reading
Filed under writing
those who know gifco
Those who have failed to regulate the self. Those whose behaviours enact a medicating fiction. Those who flew to the Canary Islands on a cheap ticket in December 1991 & left the remains of their personality in the apartment hotel. … Continue reading
Filed under the horror
new year 67
Metaphors of humanity as a turbulent system through which energy is lost into the context; of life considered as Levy flights from small town to small town; of the (false) idea you can start out new every day; of downward … Continue reading
Filed under lost & found
you’re lost
Some common moorland bird, I never knew its name, makes a strange piping two-note call. Clagged up in a tiny but brutally self-similar stretch of peat somewhere between the Chew Valley & Laddow Rocks, we would imitate the sound but … Continue reading
Filed under landscape, lost & found
