Only when Mitchell had walked down the stone steps did he realise that the whole bay was covered with shoes, thousands and thousands of shoes. One of the policeman stood on the sands at the bottom of the steps, ordering the prisoners to collect as many as possible before the tide turned. No word about … Continue reading Shoes
Category: writing
Time Signature
An explosion echoed across the bay. The reports of the aftershock caught against the flank of the building, rebounded along the rough edges of coastline, rippling back into the car park like discussions of bad news. On his drive along the coast, Mitchell had passed the turning for a quarry, the trucks grimed with white … Continue reading Time Signature
Emperor Court
You reach Emperor Court along a new road, a dreamy petrol-blue expanse, cutting wide and perfect across a delta of wild marshland. You turn off the main coastal route and keep the remains of a village behind you: the closed up service station, the vacant play park and roadside café, the row of yellow terraced … Continue reading Emperor Court
Scenes From The Island
I started this blog to defend a particular point. An oblique point, perhaps, and one which I more or less discovered as I went along. In part, I wanted to preserve some old published and unpublished writing, and find a space to think aloud about books and writing. All of that led me to grapple … Continue reading Scenes From The Island
Electric Nation!
'This parched evening seasons the night with remembrances of rain. Very few suspect the existence of this city. It is as if not only the media but the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge and perception to pass it by. Rumour says there is practically no power here. Neither television cameras no on-the-spot broadcasts … Continue reading Electric Nation!
Interzone 285
My story 'Frankie' features in issue 285 of Interzone, out this week. 'Coming over with the night train and what else is there to say? Moonlight and gin is the recipe. None of us have the time. Starlings and eagles happen. Dream is the key. The line of traffic in the rural road, the faded … Continue reading Interzone 285
The City’s A Heart
'They were worldsick, as meaning yawed. Anything was anything, now. Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable. They could be mythologers now: they'd never had monsters, but now the world was all chimeras, each metaphor a splicing. They city's a heart, I said, and in that a heart and a city … Continue reading The City’s A Heart
Chapel
In that dream, I walk through the woods near my childhood home, along the road towards my grandparents' house, a narrow, circuitous route over the railway lines, where I cycled regularly to find new places to play, idle and adventurous through those days of exquisite freedom. In the dream, it always dusk, long shadows cast … Continue reading Chapel
Crossroads
We drove out to the old routes, the old roads, the paths across woodland and beyond the railway line, the fields where silage had been sealed in rolls of black plastic, a squat redbrick church, an old manor house converted to a retreat for affluent addicts. I remembered how we would often rove (that word, … Continue reading Crossroads
Birch Grove
'The birch grove was more or less in the centre of the town of Cadast. Eight paths led away from it, winding narrowly off among trees. There was a whiff of woodsmoke in the air; where the branches were thin at the south edge of the grove you could see smoke rise from a house-chimney, … Continue reading Birch Grove
Absence Club 