The Dad-Map is, of course, never really settled: borders and landmarks can shift and change. Well-trodden paths can suddenly, unexpectedly, develop surprising new forks and turns.
What follows is no definitive guide, simply a brief tour of some of my own most memorable destinations.
Brutal Blocks – a new poem of mine, you can read in Eche Poetry Issue Three.
My backhanded, somewhat grudging tribute to Bath, from a Bristolian.
A while ago, I wrote a poem about the experience of buying records in shops, as a kind of post-streaming, tribute to the irreplaceable, tactile, sensory atmosphere of physical stores. The poem ‘Unfulfilled Playlist’ has now been published on Wild Court, where you can read it.
Delighted to have a feature about ‘Street Sailing’ in Bristol 24/7′
In my mental landscape, Bristol is a city of hills, not towers. Although, one local tower – the Purdown Transmitter, or BT Tower loomed large in my imagination. Not least because it looked more like some kind of alien space station, than a building that belonged at the north eastern edge of 1980s Bristol.
There’s a painting in the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery that I can’t say I exactly liked as a child, but it fascinated me and has haunted me a little ever since.
Where hauntology may see the progressive mind mourning a future state that hasn’t come to pass and hiraeth feels loss for a place or time once known, sehnsucht and anemoia, represent something more tricksy, even dangerous, more like a desire for a version of the past that has slipped away, or never really existed at all.
For a long time it didn’t have a name. It was just the lane that ran along the back of Mum and Dad’s bookshop…Eventually, I was to discover that there was a lot more to this old city route than I could possibly have imagined.
Is it possible to be haunted by a place? I think that I may be. In this case it is Ashley Vale in Bristol – an exceptional urban oasis caught between the tracks, containing allotments, woods, hilltops and a pub next door to a farm.
Wherever you find yourself in Bristol, a hill will be lying in wait. South Bristol even has a whole area seemingly named in jokey reference to its steep streets – Totterdown.
My favourite though, will always be Brandon Hill – scene of public protest, fake duels, restrictive carpet beating and for a long time, hermit’s cells.
A new way to go behind the scenes of some of Bristol’s most historic buildings.
Landscapes, imagined and remembered, have always played a central role in literature.
The fascinating relationship between writers and the British landscape is currently explored in a new exhibition at The British Library: Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands. Here are some thoughts it inspired.
Once upon a time a young woman opened a bookshop…
As a teenager in the eighties my hometown seemed blessed with a surprising variety of record shops, but I always saw Revolver as the one true emporium of cool.
We knew it wasn’t ours – considered it on loan,
sliver of old wild earth made common ground,
swallowed by city, only partially digested,
an accidental place, become essential.
Richly Evocative 