One of them wears the bluest trainers I have ever seen, blue like the carrier bags given away at Brixton market which is about the bluest thing in this city during late October when the rain comes down. The drunks board the tube train at Stockwell, five or six of them stepping from the platform. … Continue reading Drunks
Category: Fiction
The Slide Area by Gavin Lambert
'Los Angeles is not a city but a series of suburban approaches to a city that never materializes.' More by accident than any kind of plan, one of the early features of this blog has been the relationship between word and image. And so, to follow that theme, I thought I'd write about a novel … Continue reading The Slide Area by Gavin Lambert
The Queen of the Night by Marc Behm
'I hate furniture and clowns.' And kicked on by that first line, we follow Edmonde Sieglinde Kerrl and her hazardous progress through Nazi Germany, from the rise of the party until the trials at Nuremberg. A lover of Shakespeare and opera, sexually liberated and haunted by the spectre of her deceased father, Edmonde is a … Continue reading The Queen of the Night by Marc Behm
Absence Club
In 2001, I travelled to Brussels, for a long weekend. One night, travelling back to my hotel on the Metro, on the way to Simonis, a man took the seat opposite me. He was mixed race, and balding, dressed in jeans and trainers, a T-shirt with an illegible decal underneath his cotton jacket