On Castles and Towers and Dungeons and Pretty Gardens

I’m off to Toulouse today. Well, I’m flying there. I land at 9pm, ish, and when I walk out of the airport Seth will be standing there, just like he was last year in Avignon, just like he was in Tasmania. Then we’ll climb up into his van – the one he converted into a mobile home three years ago – and drive to his new apartment, in a town called Albi. It has a very nice brick cathedral, apparently. Seth tells me about it every time we speak on the phone.

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On Interior Design and The Brilliance of English Grass

I can’t remember what I wrote on this site about my trip to Latin America last year. I think I wrote good things – or at least, 90% good things with the usual ‘wahey’ shenanigans thrown in. In truth though, and certainly upon reflection, I didn’t love the trip. I definitely loved bits of it, like standing on an erupting volcano and swimming in a warm bioluminescent sea, but there was a heck of a lot of slogging to get from good bit to good bit – and not just slogging, but dangerous slogging. Like the bus ride to San Cristobal: a nightmarish twelve hours careening through dark mountain passes, being pulled over every hour by ominous squads of ‘police’ who wore revolvers but no visible badges. There was a lot of that. There was a lot of other stuff that sucked too, which I never wrote down and don’t really like to talk about.

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On Juggling and Denzel Washington

Started learning to juggle. Dunno why really. It’s just cool, isn’t it? When you discover that someone you know can juggle, you always find them a bit more interesting – a little bit more mysterious. Because who in their right mind learns to juggle? What’s the benefit? Surely it takes a very long time to get good at it – and who has a very long time to do anything these days, let alone whap a trio of soft balls endlessly from palm to palm? And then there’s the practical stuff: how did they learn? You never walk through the park and see a would-be juggler at the outset, teetering around with their neck craned skywards and arms windmilling, balls flying everywhere as they grimace and whisper ‘oh fucking hell’. If you see someone juggling in a park, they can already juggle well. Who trains them? There’s something a tiny bit magical about it.

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I Intended This One To Be A ‘Year In Review’ Type Thing, But I Immediately Got Carried Away Talking About How Much I Love Teaching

Because I don’t have any better ideas, I’ll begin by describing the room I am in. It is a bedroom. It is a bedroom in my mum and stepdad’s house, in Bardsey, in Leeds, in Yorkshire, in England. It wasn’t always mine, this room: it used to be Charlie’s, back when he was finishing Sixth Form and I was away gallivanting. For many years, I had no permanent room in this house. That’s changed now: this room is largely considered to be “Dan’s’ room”, because for the last year or so I’ve been living in it. Nice to have a room.

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At Home | More Scheming, Less Steaming

You wouldn’t know it – I mean, how could you know it – but I write these diaries all the time. I just never publish them. What usually happens is that I begin doing some other thing, like working or reading a book, and at that instant I am struck by inspiration, and I throw everything aside and sit down and hammer out 2000 words in an insane blur that I barely even remember. Then I sit back and crack my knuckles and read what I’ve written, and while I read my jaw gently slackens, until finally I think ‘nobody must ever discover how shit a writer I am, how inane, how poundingly mediocre my thoughts are’ and I delete them all in an orgasm of self-loathing.

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London | Rapunzel

Well, after spending much of December chortling at all my friends getting struck down and locked away with Covid, I got struck down and locked away with Covid. I developed a cough on the 2nd of January, and tested myself on the 3rd. Within seconds the latty flow showed up an absolute wedge of a positive line, and I was very cross and upset.

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