Category Archives: Stories from forgotten space

I stare at bus stops, and it brings me home.

Late November 2003 I’m losing weight again. I’m ‘winning’ though, I tell myself. I’m successfully skirting the impurity of life. Regulating food intake, regulating exercise, regulated hard work and regulated social interactions. “Never get too close” from where the flesh would expose its foolish core, and be tainted in another’s eyes in tones one doesn’tContinue reading “I stare at bus stops, and it brings me home.”

Uncountable train journeys to Nowhere

The existential predicament of trying to get somewhere but never getting anywhere defines my adult life, but, by extension, my inability to actually arrive in adulthood. It’s a small story, based on a small measure of freedom to act in ways that I deemed would get me there, against a background of big big stories;Continue reading “Uncountable train journeys to Nowhere”

What to do? In this city, in this world

Edited version of text originally posted in Autumn 2016. I got the express train across the pennines. I’ve always wanted to reach the Metropolis on the other side, only to repeatedly realise it’s no lost world, no place where things are done differently, after all. “What spurs me on to travel to other towns andContinue reading “What to do? In this city, in this world”

Neither here nor there – somewhere only fleeting.

I stand at the railway station anxiously tensing my stomach to look as flat as possible, arms tight and reluctant to leave their position next to my rib cage. It’s all so familiar, countless adulthood hours stranded in discontent at nearby transport terminals, waiting to be delivered from this daily dis-ease. A kind of inertia,Continue reading “Neither here nor there – somewhere only fleeting.”

Photos from the Lockdown year

I recently rediscovered photographs from late 2020 early 2021, a time that already feels foreign, even as still try to adopt to the ‘back to normal’ culture. I had a studio in my home town at the time, and the area, already a semi-forgotten part of town, felt like the edge of the world duringContinue reading “Photos from the Lockdown year”

How Did I Get So Old? (pre-GE2017 musings)

I really wanted to make more of this project before election day, but the things I had been documenting spread into a project I felt I couldn’t reasonably complete in the time space left. I had been making narrated maps and compiling photographs from the 7th May onwards, but to post all of that rightContinue reading “How Did I Get So Old? (pre-GE2017 musings)”

Teresa Mayday (Writings From HMS Brexit)

This cut of HMS Brexit is a montage of considerations and conversations held in urban Yorkshire around Teresa May Day, 2017. The election promise of more bank holidays is perhaps the most worryingly feeble soundbite the Labour Party have pitted against May’s iron-agenda of “a vision of a man chipping ice off his windscreen andContinue reading “Teresa Mayday (Writings From HMS Brexit)”

This isn’t even Ballard’s ‘Glorified Lifeboat’ (Writings From HMS Brexit)

This voyage, perhaps even whole flat earth that it navigates, has reached an end point. This is an epochal moment – yet we duck, dive, and talk about following our forefathers’ impossible footsteps into yesterdays’ jobs, homes and families, where hair goes grey and skin wrinkles with the pride of purpose. These footsteps lurch overContinue reading “This isn’t even Ballard’s ‘Glorified Lifeboat’ (Writings From HMS Brexit)”