Well I woke up and it was my thirty third birthday – a few texts from friends, a couple of cards to open I’d brought with me, and when Annie woke up we had breakfast and I watched TV on the sofa while the girls got ready.
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New York Pt 5 | MoMA
Now, at this point in these dairies I couldn’t blame you if you’d quietly begun to wonder whether we got drunk every single day of the trip. Well – more or less, yes. But not really on day five, which is the day I’m writing about now. No: day five was one of culture. With just a smattering of boozing.
Continue readingNew York Pt 3 | The Middle of Little Italy
Day three started with a mean hangover – nausea and general slug-brained pungence, obviously, but twentyfold worse was the beer-fear. I never got post-alcohol anxiety when I was younger, at all. I could take my top off and whirl it above my head, stun everyone around me with a loud and crass story about my own ass, twirl around a stripper pole and wake up in a hedge, and at 9am I’d open my eyes, dust myself down and go about my day. With each creeping year, however, my ability to shrug away such buffoonery diminishes. These days I’m riddled with guilt if I forget what someone’s job is.
Continue readingNew York Pt 2 | NYPD
Annie wakes up late – always has. Due to the jet lag I was up at the crack of dawn, and lay on my sofa bed looking at my phone for, oh, a good two hours before I heard the usual high-pitched stretching yawn-screech that signifies Annie is awake. She stumbled through to the living room in a baggy black tee and tartan boxer shorts, her platinum hair mashed into a high David Lynch wave by her pillow.
Continue readingAthens | The Seven Thrones
T’was the morning after. The previous night out had been aggressively mediocre; a dozen of us went out for dinner, but the bill splitting was chaos and in the end I ate nothing and shared a bottle of wine with Tom, to make things simpler. I know that doesn’t really make any sense, but it seemed a practical idea at the time.
Continue readingAthens | Museum Ad Nauseam
I woke up in the morning and went down to breakfast; Alan joined me soon after, looking pale.
“Dude, I shouldn’t have had the whiskey last night. I threw up last night,” he said. “On the floor in my dorm.”
Continue readingLondon | The Dictionary of Dan
Well, I said the next time I wrote it would be post-holiday, but whatever. I’m not going to Athens until March, which is ages away, and I want to write something.
Alright!
Continue readingLondon | Infernal City
Not written in ages but also can’t be bothered to rehash several quite major changes and would prefer to move onto smaller yet more interesting things so here we go, a quick update / recap / whatever:
Continue readingLondon | A Foray Into Dalston
Twenty twenty six! My resolution this year is ‘Have More Fun’. I don’t really know what I mean by that; I left it ambiguous and open-ended on purpose. Maybe a resolution more closely fitted to my current state of mind would be ‘Be Less Serious’, but I suppose it’s better (and more enjoyable) to encourage healthy behaviours rather than discourage bad ones.
Continue readingLondon | Meditating
It’s funny publishing The Purloined Princess. I have to shut off entire wings of my brain to find the courage to do it. So many doubts. I wrote it eight years ago, and I feel very differently at 32 than I did at 24. I read my old writing and I think – good lord I had a lot of zeal. The confidence! The hubris!
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