We spent the next evening in the wizard’s clearing, figuring that we’d already been doomed once so what the hell difference did it make. The next morning we set out early after a breakfast of delicious sausages (which Margaret did not approve of one bit) and an entire wheel of cheese, which we devoured in about fifteen minutes and had us all gaseous and bloated for the whole morning on the woodland trail.
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I don’t know how long I was unconscious for; all I know is that I was brought back around by a hand plunging into the snow, fingers outstretched and grasping. The probing hand happened upon my regal face, and as it prodded my buried flesh, I heard excited yells coming from above ground. The fingers gripped my face by the nostrils and hauled me up through the snow, slowly and painfully excavating me, inch by inch, and the wrenching agony wasn’t helped by the fact that the mead had worn off and I was now deathly hungover.
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It turned out that the prince’s home city of Bloodroot was far, far away, because nothing is ever easy. To reach his castle, we would have to traverse the Klinghorn Mountains, plot a course through the Goochi Desert, navigate the gloom of the Mines of Mupplecock, and cross the Sea of Pìss (pronounced peace).
Continue readingListen you, I’ve been making decisions. Big decisions! Too big sometimes – I keep nearly moving to Vietnam. But here are two things I have decided upon which are of a reasonable size.
Continue readingThings that are not ideal but we must persevere:
One: it’s been cloudy in London for a long time.
Two: I am redundant – I am without job. This happened seven days ago, on a Tuesday, at about 4pm.
Continue readingI didn’t go to Krakow to see Ralfi – not specifically – but I was glad to meet him outside the airport, glad I’d booked an extra day at the beginning of my trip to spend time with the Polish engineer, the friend I’d been tutoring in English for almost two years. A tall, handsome family-man in his 40s, Ralfi is the kind of man I’ve always enjoyed: someone with energy a little beyond himself, a streak of naughtiness and a heap of curiosity. His capacity for wonder in our lessons has always made me smile. Some students, you teach them a grammar rule and they nod and say ‘okay’. Others, they open their eyes and mouths wide and say ‘wow’. Moments like that are the reason I do what I do.
Continue readingNew things:
I am reading Beloved by Toni Morrison. I avoided reading this book for several years, despite it being at the top of so many must-read lists, because of the title. I assumed it would be something dewy-eyed and soft, and on impulse I usually swerve those kinds of books (not that I know why, because whenever I’ve read dewy-eyed and soft novels I’ve invariably loved them). But Beloved is not in the least soft. It’s gorgeous and lyrical and absolutely fucking brutal. I can feel parts of me getting rearranged as I read it, shifting around like complex hydraulics on the door of a bank vault.
Continue readingI’ve been consuming a lot of media recently about the 1960s. It wasn’t on purpose – it just sort of happened. It started a few weeks ago when I went to visit Vic in Bristol for a summery nostalgic weekend and on the way there on the three-hour bus I listened to a song in my headphones – I forget what it was exactly, maybe She’s So Heavy or Her Majesty or something – but it was a Beatles song, and I decided to look it up on Wikipedia.
Continue readingOpen the door. Look down: see the ginger cat with sky-blue blue collar who makes a bed of the planter by the front step. She flees, hissing, down the garden path – follow her but watch your hair; the thorny arms of the rose bush are overgrown and reach overhead in a long arch. The postman caught his forehead on one last week and gave me a telling off, which I was determined not to feel guilty about because A) it’s not my fault that plants grow and B) he should watch where he’s going.
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