Then in the twentieth century they invented transparent adhesive tape, the first record played on Radio 1 was Flowers In The Rain by the Move, and whereas ink had previously been in pots, now it was in cartridges. They killed each other a lot and found ingenious and crafty ways to do it, sometimes one […]

‘Drivers wanted. Thieves and alcoholics need not apply.’ Job ad in a butcher’s window. And yet we’re good with meat. Our agile fingers know how to pick a crusted lock. Corn-fed chickens wait quartered in the cold safe in a fur of breath. Under our coats we hide small finds—an ear, a stiffened wing, a […]

You get addicted to the ink, or the pain; one of the two. When she came in here for that rose   on her shoulder, I might have known it would come to this; years later, her body painted from head   to foot in a thousand colours. I read her now like a picture […]

Less light was what they wanted. Less light and a chance to look up to see tonight’s old stars shining and dying. Dark skies and fewer street lamps leaking Lucozade into a space once reserved for heaven, where they might glimpse Venus opening her door a crack, or, leaning out of an upstairs window, overhear […]

Virtual snow on the line, a starry damask night, the train quits the virtual station. Wellwishers gather on the cinderpath. Knowing   how to say goodbye. Passengers with tall hats in half windows alight in the opening pages. A red signal power-cut lasts an entire chapter.   But the couple are true; emerge from lost […]

What is held here, weighing so little, keeps close to the floor and where linoleum gives way to wilderness, gathers in the shadows of stones.   The days pass like thieves, in the disinfection of letters, the collective study of quarantine law and the microscopic recitation of sand.   At the doors experts assemble for […]

Paleontologists treasure the rare geological circumstances that permit an occasional preservation of soft parts. – Stephen Jay Gould Perhaps there is some transcendental place, some cove or niche somewhere in which the pouches, lobes and gills, suckers, lips and tentacles of countless ancient animals endure. For bones are not much more than relics really. They […]

We take the air of our low-maintenance roof-garden this austere quad our best line of defence from the smoky street where we hear arteries harden.   Honesty seems a new form of pretence for here is hardly either Avalon or Eden. Yet this gravel reach can seem a wild expanse.   We splay on deckchairs […]

I. The Art of Illumination At times it is a good life, with the evening sun gilding the abbey tower, the brook’s cold waters sliding past and every hour in my Book a blank page, vellum pumice-stoned to chalky lustres which my inks suffuse: saffron and sandarach and dragon’s blood, azure and verdigris. Monsters and […]