I am facing the end. Am I?
The end is coming very soon. That is, the end of my commuting. That is, the end of my regular…
The end is coming very soon. That is, the end of my commuting. That is, the end of my regular…
This is the end of summer. A year passes on the blog. If you dropped in a while back wondering…
I drop my polished, black tile of a mobile on the oiled, sprung office floor and the touchscreen breaks. There…
Breath, it is seriously quiet on this train. Look, that girl and her guy are energy-high on caffeine cans but…
In August the buddleia finally pushes electric purple heads to the third rail, a wave of dancers – jewelled feathers…
and suddenly I was in this little place in Christianshavn, drinking coffee, eating pear pie and watching the Danes tog…
The here is a furnace of touch, where body blood can be felt from an arm’s length if we had…
We stopped at Petts Wood for a group of Chinese twenties, which was odd for the time and the place….
Look guys, just give me a wedge to pin my body tight, a rail to grab and stop the body-sway,…
is dying quietly in lines I drew, space we flew, paced in mind, rendered sane. I never thought the action…
It never oozed like Dean Street, where the blooded wet the steps of the Soho Theatre and splay across railings…
Back from an essential piece of commuter annual leave, paced across the up-up-uplands of Austria, eaten through strudel and drunk…
We broke from the platform in scattered sun to skim through a suburb of jungle elders and floppy sycamores, daubed…
Take a linen cloth and screw it up, wring it tight until the fabric tears, peel it long and lay…
If you step up on the threshold of the seven thirty-seven you’ll find a lot of newsprint on its way…
The best pint I ever had was my first, a bitter, at seventeen (not a bad kid). It was thirty-nine…
I’m very grateful for the feedback from our performance at the Tristan Bates theatre last week. Special thanks to Jez…
The prodigal dragged himself to the last but one crest and collapsed back to his bloodied palms. The heat seared…
They sat down next to her, him, the urine and the walking stick. ‘Go on, move up away from me…
Was I kneeling? They came out cruel, and made a king’s mockery of this man. Purple and red are…
I want to sing out loud but can’t because I’d frighten others on the train if I started. So I…
I amended my author page a couple of times this month, and commented that much of what I write is…
I flew to Denmark in search of a soul that, I fancied, lived in cyan, bold on an unfamiliar stamp…
I spend far too long dreaming over the individual words. Is that the privilege of a commuter? ‘I don’t know…
she booked me first and so the blackberry jam and toast struggle for space interlaid with the blotter and gleaming…
If the dog didn’t keep dumping her slobbery ball all over my trousers I might be able to write this……
Two thousand and twelve, it was, when I tried to do it myself, but twenty-four months later and we’re live….
I’m awake in the sleep of an early end with a cup at my fingers, and the rhythm of Latin…
He’s your son! she screamed as he ran off and hid by the photo booth; and she raced after him,…
A yellow grin is wiped across the landscape in the brilliant sunshine of a commuter morning that shouts Friday, which…
I had a dream that the whole world had burrowed to Oxford Street but they couldn’t get out because the…
A downlighter soaked the back of his hair. “We’re just not made to be people who say: ‘In five year’s…
I walk to the building. I enter. I pass Dimitri leaving, who frowns at me half-seen, and step onto light,…
An open dawn widening eyes and chilling the promise of day, sprung to leap under blue-hung clouds; shredded in light,…
I had a train set like this when I was young. The service was delayed until lunch was cleared away…
Said the back to the brain: ‘this vertebrate pain is driving my spinal ladder insane’. Said the brain to…
Now swimming in a foggy spa, warm as treacle, and people everywhere the same: happy, lost, finding themselves on the…
Waste is held at the junction, waiting for a green, overpowered by traction, bound with lead and steel; one engine…
We were all gazing up from our fingernails, some with powdered newsprint hands, some with screwed-up iscreen pixels, some with…
‘Have a look at this’. My father swayed, the living room a trench of obstacles, and wove string-ball to his…
The man in the beige raincoat opposite has his nose in a book. He pulls on a frown, and then…
How many sleepers are there on the line to Charing Cross? I wonder if they count them all or whether…
1 1 A late train is better than a mythic one. 2 Better an announcement clipped with facts than a…
Heat-wrapped and hit semi-conscious on a late week morning, snow icing the highs of the verge and the dawn candescent…
The canvas spans a screen before it folds and Tuscany is shrunk to yellow icon: olives spotted low in dipping…
Hot brown tea on the table blocks the blue water of the pool scored in lines across the panning camera…
08.25 Underneath a black and spotted clutch of thirties ironwork, trace-lit by fluorine, condensed to white in damp reflection, backlit…
A thin mist hangs over the houses and a sharp, white frost in the brambles beside the track, as we…
A howl hit the Charing Cross canopy as Sir Gerald Ashwarlingham-Buckleby swore at the man on the ticket gate whilst…
It’s Friday, and the sun is low: I wanted to work but couldn’t, so I picked up my pen to…
A humid, heavy yawn folds up the day and marks the seconds on the bright departure clock; scrolling hours unending,…
You left a lot of stuff behind me on the shelves: I’ve spent the last two hours dumping it in…
When the Fifty-Five knocked me down on Oxford Street (and after I’d left my wallet at home) security picked up…
Will you remember the mudstraw hug when, after autumn lanes of rippling squirrels, curling beyond the doglost fields, under hops…
And do I wish to worship under vaults, eight hundred years of patina peppered to a crust; or in one…
Staring from a window on the south side of Soho was a young Chinese lady with noodles in her bowl….
I hate this recession, swollen twice in spate to obliterate the banks, to flush solids and spring beauty alike in…
I’m walking to the station through the needling mist. The grass on the cricket ground is grey with dew just…