An Alternative Writing Retreat
It might be the first thing you see as you arrive, or the last thing before you depart. You might not notice it at all. It lurks, semi-submerged, at the far end of the platforms, only its top half ever exposed, marking its own corner at Navigation and Brunel Streets: NEWSTREETSTATIONSIGNALBOX…
Half an inch from the south shore, a line is cast from nowhere, black dots, black dashes, almost north, almost parallel to the line of the Humber Bridge, red on green, half an inch to the left. The bridge is cut off by the ordnance grid. The dots and dashes float in a pale blue square…
A Google search for “Voldemort’s grave” will return more than 100,000 results, most of them pointing to Greyfriars Kirkyard – a modest graveyard in the middle of Edinburgh, best known as the final resting place of Greyfriars Bobby…
There are 24-hour gyms open around the clock in most cities and towns in the UK. Here we examine the daily rhythms of these strange, liminal spaces…
It’s so easy to gaze disparagingly, even mournfully, on the site of an LPG tank in a garden. Easy to consider it misplaced, miscreant, a boil on the face of a view. An objection at a local planning meeting to its placement was met with a wry smile…
I’d spent too many hours at the wheel, racing the December dusk to get to our destination before darkness fell. Too many hours scrutinising every junction, traffic lane and sign, of passing through new places and barely seeing them…
And then you realise that everyone around you – a crowd of thousands, all along the quays – are almost completely silent. There’s no wind, no rain, no massive heat from the fire, nothing, like everything else on earth has stopped…
Journalist Mackenzie Weinger travels in the footsteps of Thomas Hardy, through the partly real, partly dream-country that inspired his fiction…