I never considered handles before this, never wondered who’d held my borrowed basket last filled it, gripped it tight, placed it back neat or abandoned by checkout, unsettling us in its eerie. Didn’t ask, didn’t wonder what those hands did, who they touched waved slapped caressed, ever so tender. Did they stare at the milk…
All of this nature appeared to be on tap, but to be there in Melbourne, during a summer of killer fires, was disconcerting. Although increasingly aware of the pace of climate change, or climate emergency back home, here the movement felt faster and more urgent than ever. This was Life going wrong at speed, not a sad decline over decades or years, but a race to destruction on fast forward.
The day Bristol Museum and Art Gallery’s Chinese Room disappeared, was the day I first realised that places, like people, can change.
To my childhood self, the idea that a place wasn’t fixed, that it wouldn’t necessarily always be the same and might even vanish, came as a shock.
Two thoughts, or questions, struck me recently as I reflected on the books I’ve read during 2018. The first was, where do all these books come from? I don’t mean in a literal sense; from a shop or library, but where did I hear about them? I often wonder this about authors in end-of-year-round-ups of…
Imagine a world where there was a demand for poems to be repaired, plot holes to be fixed, unnecessary exposition removed, unfinished tales completed, or lost books and stories to be patched-up and rewritten. The literary equivalent of MyBuilder; let’s call it, Your writer.
The large frames created between the support struts, beneath the corrugated iron roof, seem like glassless windows, with ash and oak, horse chestnut, hazel, sycamore and brambles pressing themselves right up to the edges. Sometimes it feels as though passengers are being protected from the looming sylvan creatures beyond.
Going down to the mill is something we do every time we come here. It’s a short distance downhill from Rue de la Roche, where my parents-in-law live, to the town’s second river. When the water is low, as it usually is in August, the visit also includes a walk across the stepping stones and…
I started to wonder how far I should go, without a map or much water, but a trail leading out of town and into the fields is always hard to resist. After all, as Richard Jeffries notes in in Nature Near London, one should “Never omit to explore a footpath, for never was there a footpath yet which did not pass something of interest.”
…there on the edge of the flat stretching roof
Stood a magpie, a gull and a pigeon
Neatly spaced –
The cast from some terrible joke.
I’ve always quite liked the style of old handbills: the erratic punctuation, jumbled type sizes and overuse of exclamation marks especially. If I produced a handbill for this blog, it would look something like this…
As the beam touches you, it has a near instant effect, quickly drawing your thoughts out through the window and filling you with a desire to be out there, on the other side of the glass, walking in the sunlight, exploring the city streets, or escaping over the horizon, (I like to think of this particular effect as a positive variety of Corpse-light or Willow-the-wisp, but without the danger of being drawn into some terrible dark and boggy end).
I had a Charlie Brown moment this morning.
Up early, I glanced out of the window and was struck dumb by the sky.
To the left of the hostel, and contrasting with its lime-white walls, the soot darkened, red and yellow bricks of St Alban the Martyr, stretch up and up – in one direction forming the church’s hulking tower, in another eventually tapering into a gabled roof with turrets, topped with a crucifix – and just a little lower down, mammon’s TV aerial.
St Alban’s grand scale crammed into a tight spot, give this half-hidden Neo Gothic edifice an uncomfortably, squeezed appearance; like a fat parochial priest squashed into the corner of a Southern Train vestibule.
I’m doing Movember this year. For those of you who know all about it, please hurry along and make a donation here: http://mobro.co/mattgilbert1 For everyone else, here’s a bit more information: During November each year, Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces in the UK and around the world.…
If only more ads were as good as this. This American commercial for Audi Quattro is excellent. Based on a strong but simple idea, it draws inspiration from Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’, but here it is a Great White Car rather than a Whale that is pursued by a man obsessed with hooking the thing. (What…
There’s a lot to put you off Twitter. People spreading hate. Bots pretending to be people spreading hate. People wanting to police the thoughts and comments of strangers. Attack mobs flaring up. Oversharing. Utter inanity and mundanity. I get why lots of people leave or never join in the first place. But, there is also…
Why is it that a certain kind of person in this country finds it so hard to accept that children exist? It’s not as if they are a rarity. If you have or know children, you’ve probably encountered the type. They’re often male, but not exclusively, usually fairly well-off and long past their own youth.…
